Incentives-Based Mechanism for Efficient Demand Response Programs

In this work we investigate the inefficiency of the electricity system with strategic agents. Specifically, we prove that without a proper control the total demand of an inefficient system is at most twice the total demand of the optimal outcome. We propose an incentives scheme that promotes optimal outcomes in the inefficient electricity market. The economic incentives can be seen as an indirect revelation mechanism that allocates resources using a one-dimensional message space per resource to be allocated. The mechanism does not request private information from users and is valid for any concave customer's valuation function. We propose a distributed implementation of the mechanism using population games and evaluate the performance of four popular dynamics methods in terms of the cost to implement the mechanism. We find that the achievement of efficiency in strategic environments might be achieved at a cost, which is dependent on both the users' preferences and the dynamic evolution of the system. Some simulation results illustrate the ideas presented throughout the paper.Comment: 38 pages, 9 figures, submitted to journa

Efficient wireless multimedia multicast in multi-rate multi-channel mesh networks.

Devices in wireless mesh networks can operate on multiple channels (MC) and automatically adjust their transmission rates for the occupied channels. This paper shows how to improve performance-guaranteed multicasting transmission coverage for wireless multihop mesh networks by exploring the transmission opportunity offered by multiple rates (MR) and MC. Based on the characteristics of transmissions with different rates, we propose and analyze parallel low-rate transmissions and alternative rate transmissions (ART) to explore the advantages of MRMC in improving the performance and coverage tradeoff under the constraint of limited channel resources. We then apply these new transmission schemes to improve the WMN multicast experience. Combined with the strategy of reliable interference-controlled connections, a novel MRMC multicast algorithm (LC-MRMC) is designed to make efficient use of channel and rate resources to greatly extend wireless multicast coverage with high throughput and short delay performance. Our NS2 simulation results prove that ART and LC-MRMC achieve improved wireless transmission quality across much larger areas as compared to other related studies