An evolutionary game-theoretic approach to congestion control

This paper investigates a system where a set of users sharing a bottleneck link must choose the transmission rate at which multimedia traffic is received. Users are assumed to be self-regarding and make their decisions with the sole goal of maximizing their perceived quality. We are interested in the dynamic process by which users adapt their data rates and the convergence of this process to equilibria. We propose a novel two-layer model to represent this system: the upper layer is an evolutionary game-theoretic model that captures how users adapt their rates; the lower layer model captures the network performance and the quality perceived by the users. Using the model proposed, we demonstrate analytically and numerically several interesting properties of the system equilibria. In particular, we establish the relationship between system states that have non-negligible steady state probabilities and Nash equilibria of the induced game.