This proposal by two principal investigators describes a three-year research plan aimed at developing a general theory of congestion control for high speed communication networks, allowing for cooperation as well as noncooperation among the users. The focal point of proposed research is flow control of traffic that can adapt to the congestion state of the network by regulation of the input transmission rate of packets into the system. This will involve the user of a rich set of tools from decentralized team theory, dynamic game theory, and robust identification and estimation. The framework adopted will accommodate many realistic scenarios, such as variable feedback delays, unknown feedback delays, bursty sources, and multiple bottleneck nodes to accommodate max-min fairness.
Research efforts along the lines described in the proposal should lead to major advances in the methodology and design of decentralized flow controllers for high speed networks, as well as to some new fundamental results in the theories of decentralized teams and dynamic games. They should also contribute toward making the methodology and the emerging design tools accessible to undergraduate and beginning graduate students in an engineering curriculum.
