Intelligent Computer Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach to Compute the Traffic Equilibrium of Various Routing Schemes for Multimedia Applications in Wireless Networks

A recent trend in routing research is to avoid inefficiencies in network level routing by allowing hosts to either choose routes themselves (e.g., source routing) or use overlay routing networks. Such end-to-end route selection schemes are selfish by nature, in that they allow end users to greedily select routes to optimize their own performance without considering the system-wide criteria. Recent theoretical results suggest that in the worst case, selfish routing can result in serious performance degradation due to lack of cooperation. So, the objective of this dissertation work is to apply Game Theoretic Approach on routing protocols for removing inefficiencies and analyzing how it is better than conventional TCP/IP routing protocols. Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics, which deals with multi person decision making situations. A routing protocol can be modeled as a minimax game between the network and the routers. And it is analyzed based on different parameters like Delay, Jitter, Processing power etc. Network Simulator 2 tool is used for coding and simulation purpose of conventional routing protocol and minimax algorithm. rtProtoMIN - a new routing protocol is implemented in NS2 which uses minimax algorithm for finding the path from source to destination. The rtProto DV (RIP) protocol available in NS2 and the newly implemented rtProtoMIN are being used in this project to analyze their performance in different scenarios and are compared to the already existing routing protocols.