Towards microeconomic resources allocation in overlay networks

Abstract

Inherent selfishness of end-users is the main challenging problem in order to design mechanisms for overlay multicast networks. Here, the goal is to design the mechanisms that can be able to exploit the selfishness of the end-users in such a way that still leads to maximization of the network's aggregated utility. We have designed a competitive economical mechanism in which a number of independent services are provided to the end-users by a number of origin servers. Each offered service can be thought of as a commodity and the origin servers and the users who relay the service to their downstream nodes can thus be thought of as producers of the economy. Also, the end-users can be viewed as consumers of the economy. The proposed mechanism regulates the price of each service in such a way that general equilibrium holds. So, all allocations will be Pareto optimal in the sense that the social welfare of the users is maximized. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.