Flow Control in Communication Networks with Competing Teams of Cooperative Users

In this paper, we investigate flow control schemes for general communication networks with competing teams of cooperative users. Previously, for general network topologies flow control mechanisms for networks with all competitive users and with all cooperative users have been studied. In this paper, we use a hierarchical flow control scheme which is capable to represent a more realistic network condition in which there are multiple competitive teams, each team having cooperative users. That is, each team competes with the others to provide the best possible performance for its members (users) and members of each team cooperate to increase their team´s performance. All- competitive and all-cooperative cases are simply two special cases of this hierarchical model. That is, the network involves all cooperative users when there is only one team in the network and the network involves all competitive users when there are multiple teams but each having only one user. In this model, each user tries to maximize a power criterion utility function and each team tries to maximize a team´s utility function which is a weighted sum of utilities of the users in this team. We use Pareto and Non-Inferior Nash strategies as solution concepts for one team and multiple team flow control problems respectively. We compare the results of these strategies to those corresponding to the standard Nash strategy and using an illustrative example we observe that users can possibly obtain larger utilities when they are in a team than when they operate competitively on their own.