Competitive team strategies for routing control in parallel-link communication networks

In this paper we consider a two-node parallel-link communication network shared by competitive teams of users. Each team has several users with various types of traffics or jobs to be routed on the network and must compete with the other teams for the network resources. The users in each team cooperate for the benefit of their team so as to achieve optimal routing over network. For each team, there is a centralized decision-maker, called the team manager, or leader, who coordinates the routing strategies among for all users in his team. A game theoretic approach to deal with both cooperation within each team and competition among the teams, called the noninferior Nash strategy with a team manager (NNSM) is introduced. This multi-team solution provides a new framework for analyzing hierarchically controlled systems so as to address complicated coordination problems among the various users. This strategy is applied to derive the optimal routing policies for all users in the network. It is shown that the noninferior Nash strategy with a team manager is effective in improving the overall network performance. Several examples are presented.