Game theoretic rate control for mobile devices

Modern mobile devices offer increased connectivity to heterogeneous wireless networks such as WiFi and 3G. These networks typically exhibit high variability in their characteristics, which poses extra challenges to applications developed to run over them. To address this issue, we propose a game-theoretic rate control scheme for mobile devices. In this noncooperative game formulation of the system the users are assumed the to be selfish in terms of their resource (bandwidth) requests. The information requirements within the model are then simplified by exploiting the available bandwidth measurements provided by a tool called Zeus we developed for this purpose. The formulation is shown to be a potential game, admitting a unique Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, the resulting distributed gradient update algorithm is shown to converge globally. The validity of the model is verified through numerical analysis run on real data, collected by Zeus from different wireless networks.