Congestion Avoidance Control through Non-cooperative Games between Customers and Service Providers

Congestion avoidance control refers to controlling the load of the network by restricting the admission of new user’s sessions and resolving the unwanted overload situations. Admission control and Load control constitute key mechanisms regarding Radio Resource Management. As the wireless world is moving towards heterogeneous wireless networks, these types of control are facing more challenges, since efficiency and fairness are required. Game theory provides an appropriate framework for formulating fair and efficient congestion avoidance control problems. In this paper we formulate a non-cooperative game between service providers and customers. On the one hand, the service providers wish to maximize their revenue, but on the other hand, the users wish to maximize the quality of service received, keeping at the same time the expenses as low as possible. Therefore a balance has to be established among these contradictory demands. Our effort also concentrates in the proper modeling of the user’s level of satisfaction, so as to provide a logical decision-taking framework. The proposed scheme is then tested using the ns2 simulator. Results show that both parties can benefit from this mechanism.