Towards protocol equilibrium with oblivious routers

Currently, the Internet is dominated by TCP traffic. TCP is congestion aware, shares bandwidth with other TCP flows, and is stable because most flows are congestion reactive. It has been shown that current AQM schemes may not be resistant to greedy traffic agents. Thus, it is important to study mechanisms which provide incentives to greedy agents to come to an equilibrium state in their own selfish interest. In addition, we want our AQM schemes to he oblivious to the flows identities which makes them easier to scale and deploy. In this paper, we show that if routers used EWMA to measure the aggregate rate, then the best strategy for a selfish agent to minimize its losses is to arrive at a constant rate. Even though the protocol space is arbitrary, our scheme ensures that the best greedy strategy is simple, i.e. send with CBR. Then, we show how we can use the results of an earlier paper to enforce simple and efficient protocol equilibria on selfish traffic agents