Altruism in groups: an evolutionary games approach

We revisit in this paper the relation between evolution of species and the mathematical tool of evolutionary games, which has been used to model and predict it. We indicate known shortcoming of this model that restricts the capacity of evolutionary games to model groups of individuals that share a common gene or a common fitness function. In this paper we provide a new concept to remedy this shortcoming in the standard evolutionary games in order to cover this kind of behavior. Further, we explore the relationship between this new concept and Nash equilibrium or ESS. We indicate through the study of some example in the biology as Hawk and Dove game, Stag Hunt Game and Prisoner Dilemma, that when taking into account a utility that is common to a group of individuals, the equilibrium structure may change dramatically. We also study the multiple access control in slotted Aloha based wireless networks. We analyze the impact of the altruism behavior on the performance at the equilibrium

Dynamic Retransmission Limit Scheme in MAC Layer for Routing in Multihop Ad hoc Networks

We consider a wireless ad hoc network with random access channel. We present a model that takes into account topology, routing, random access in MAC layer, and forwarding probability. In this paper, we focus on drawing benefit from the interaction of the MAC (governed by IEEE 802.11 or slotted Aloha) and routing by defining a new cross-layer scheme for routing based on the limit number of retransmission. By adjusting dynamically and judiciously this parameter in a saturated network, we have realized that both stability of forwarding queues and average throughput are significantly improved in linear networks with symmetric traffic: a gain of 100% can be reached. While in asymmetric topology network with asymmetric traffic, we achieve a better average delay (resp., throughput) for each connection without changing the average throughput (resp., delay). In addition, we show the efficiency of our new scheme in case of multimedia applications with delay constraint. A detailed performance study is presented using analytical and simulation evaluation

Forever Young: Aging Control For Smartphones In Hybrid Networks

The demand for Internet services that require frequent updates through small messages, such as microblogging, has tremendously grown in the past few years. Although the use of such applications by domestic users is usually free, their access from mobile devices is subject to fees and consumes energy from limited batteries. If a user activates his mobile device and is in range of a service provider, a content update is received at the expense of monetary and energy costs. Thus, users face a tradeoff between such costs and their messages aging. The goal of this paper is to show how to cope with such a tradeoff, by devising \emph{aging control policies}. An aging control policy consists of deciding, based on the current utility of the last message received, whether to activate the mobile device, and if so, which technology to use (WiFi or 3G). We present a model that yields the optimal aging control policy. Our model is based on a Markov Decision Process in which states correspond to message ages. Using our model, we show the existence of an optimal strategy in the class of threshold strategies, wherein users activate their mobile devices if the age of their messages surpasses a given threshold and remain inactive otherwise. We then consider strategic content providers (publishers) that offer \emph{bonus packages} to users, so as to incent them to download updates of advertisement campaigns. We provide simple algorithms for publishers to determine optimal bonus levels, leveraging the fact that users adopt their optimal aging control strategies. The accuracy of our model is validated against traces from the UMass DieselNet bus network.Comment: See also http://www-net.cs.umass.edu/~sadoc/agecontrol

Flow Level QoE of Video Streaming in Wireless Networks

The Quality of Experience (QoE) of streaming service is often degraded by frequent playback interruptions. To mitigate the interruptions, the media player prefetches streaming contents before starting playback, at a cost of delay. We study the QoE of streaming from the perspective of flow dynamics. First, a framework is developed for QoE when streaming users join the network randomly and leave after downloading completion. We compute the distribution of prefetching delay using partial differential equations (PDEs), and the probability generating function of playout buffer starvations using ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for CBR streaming. Second, we extend our framework to characterize the throughput variation caused by opportunistic scheduling at the base station, and the playback variation of VBR streaming. Our study reveals that the flow dynamics is the fundamental reason of playback starvation. The QoE of streaming service is dominated by the first moments such as the average throughput of opportunistic scheduling and the mean playback rate. While the variances of throughput and playback rate have very limited impact on starvation behavior.Comment: 14 page

Emergence of Equilibria from Individual Strategies in Online Content Diffusion

Social scientists have observed that human behavior in society can often be modeled as corresponding to a threshold type policy. A new behavior would propagate by a procedure in which an individual adopts the new behavior if the fraction of his neighbors or friends having adopted the new behavior exceeds some threshold. In this paper we study the question of whether the emergence of threshold policies may be modeled as a result of some rational process which would describe the behavior of non-cooperative rational members of some social network. We focus on situations in which individuals take the decision whether to access or not some content, based on the number of views that the content has. Our analysis aims at understanding not only the behavior of individuals, but also the way in which information about the quality of a given content can be deduced from view counts when only part of the viewers that access the content are informed about its quality. In this paper we present a game formulation for the behavior of individuals using a meanfield model: the number of individuals is approximated by a continuum of atomless players and for which the Wardrop equilibrium is the solution concept. We derive conditions on the problem's parameters that result indeed in the emergence of threshold equilibria policies. But we also identify some parameters in which other structures are obtained for the equilibrium behavior of individuals