Sharing Network Resources (Paperback)

Resource Allocation lies at the heart of network control. In the early days of the Internet the scarcest resource was bandwidth, but as the network has evolved to become an essential utility in the lives of billions, the nature of the resource allocation problem has changed. This book attempts to describe the facets of resource allocation that are most relevant to modern networks. It is targeted at graduate students and researchers who have an introductory background in networking and who desire to internalize core concepts before designing new protocols and applications.

We start from the fundamental question: what problem does network resource allocation solve? This leads us, in Chapter 1, to examine what it means to satisfy a set of user applications that have different requirements of the network, and to problems in Social Choice Theory. We find that while capturing these preferences in terms of utility is clean and rigorous, there are significant limitations to this choice. Chapter 2 focuses on sharing divisible resources such as links and spectrum. Both of these resources are somewhat atypical -- a link is most accurately modeled as a queue in our context, but this leads to the analytical intractability of queueing theory, and spectrum allocation methods involve dealing with interference, a poorly understood phenomenon. Chapters 3 and 4 are introductions to two allocation workhorses: auctions and matching. In these chapters we allow the users to game the system (i.e., to be strategic), but don't allow them to collude. In Chapter 5, we relax this restriction and focus on collaboration. Finally, in Chapter 6, we discuss the theoretical yet fundamental issue of stability. Here, our contribution is mostly on making a mathematically abstruse subdiscipline more accessible without losing too much generality.

“This book is beautifully written and will be a major resource for graduate students and researchers. I plan to have my graduate students read it, both for its intellectual content and the elegant presentation.”

Professor R. Srikant
Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“This is a very nice book. I look forward to seeing it published and using it in my future offerings of courses on network economics.”

Professor Jianwei Huang
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

“I commend the authors for having successfully brought a diverse set of analytical tools developed in last 30 years from research communities such as economics and operations research into a networking textbook. I am particularly impressed that the authors are able to make these cutting-edge tools accessible to engineering students with little sacrifice for their mathematical rigor and generality.”

Jim Dai
Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Cornell University
The Chandler Family Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology (on leave)

“This is indeed a fascinating book, containing many nice results (both classical and new). It covers several key aspects of sharing network resources that are not usually covered in a typical networking book. Mostly based on mathematical models, the book deals with principles instead of protocol details.”

Libin Jiang
Qualcomm Research