Nash Equilibria in Parallel Downloading with Multiple Clients
Zhu Hong
Fudan University
Friday, April 30, 2004.
11-12, room 3464


Abstract
--------
Recently, the scheme of parallel downloading has been 
proposed as  a novel approach to  expedite the reception 
of a large file from the Internet. Experiments with a single  
client have shown that the client can improve its performance 
significantly by using the scheme. In contrast to the 
methodology used before, we formulate parallel  downloading 
as a non-cooperative game.  Within this framework, we present 
a characterization of the traffic configuration at Nash 
equilibrium in a general network, and analyze its properties 
in a specific network. We also establish the dynamic convergence 
to equilibrium from an initial non-equilibrium state 
for a specific network. Finally, we investigate the 
efficiency of Nash equilibrium from the point of view 
of the clients and the system respectively, i.e., 
downloading latencies perceived by individual clients 
and total latencies over all connections. We find that although 
the traffic configuration at Nash equilibrium is optimal from 
the point of view of the clients, it may be bad from the point 
of view of the system.