comscifacpub/4 Stochastic Stability in Internet Router Congestion

Abstract. Congestion control at bottleneck routers on the internet is a long stand-ing problem. Many policies have been proposed for effective ways to drop pack-ets from the queues of these routers so that network endpoints will be inclined to share router capacity fairly and minimize the overflow of packets trying to enter the queues. We study just how effective some of these queuing policies are when each network endpoint is a self-interested player with no information about the other players ’ actions or preferences. By employing the adaptive learning model of evolutionary game theory, we study policies such as Droptail, RED, and the greedy-flow-punishing policy proposed by Gao et al. [10] to find the stochasti-cally stable states: the states of the system that will be reached in the long run