The Shannon Cipher System with a Guessing Wiretapper: General Sources

The Shannon cipher system is studied in the context of general sources using a notion of computational secrecy introduced by Merhav & Arikan. Bounds are derived on limiting exponents of guessing moments for general sources. The bounds are shown to be tight for iid, Markov, and unifilar sources, thus recovering some known results. A close relationship between error exponents and correct decoding exponents for fixed rate source compression on the one hand and exponents for guessing moments on the other hand is established.Comment: 24 pages, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Guessing Revisited: A Large Deviations Approach

The problem of guessing a random string is revisited. A close relation between guessing and compression is first established. Then it is shown that if the sequence of distributions of the information spectrum satisfies the large deviation property with a certain rate function, then the limiting guessing exponent exists and is a scalar multiple of the Legendre-Fenchel dual of the rate function. Other sufficient conditions related to certain continuity properties of the information spectrum are briefly discussed. This approach highlights the importance of the information spectrum in determining the limiting guessing exponent. All known prior results are then re-derived as example applications of our unifying approach.Comment: 16 pages, to appear in IEEE Transaction on Information Theor

Regulation of off-network pricing in a nonneutral network

Representatives of several Internet service providers (ISPs) have expressed their wish to see a substantial change in the pricing policies of the Internet. In particular, they would like to see content providers (CPs) pay for use of the network, given the large amount of resources they use. This would be in clear violation of the "network neutrality" principle that had characterized the development of the wireline Internet. Our first goal in this paper is to propose and study possible ways of implementing such payments and of regulating their amount. We introduce a model that includes the users' behavior, the utilities of the ISP and of the CPs, and the monetary flow that involves the content users, the ISP and CP, and in particular, the CP's revenues from advertisements. We consider various game models and study the resulting equilibria; they are all combinations of a noncooperative game (in which the ISPs and CPs determine how much they will charge the users) with a "cooperative" one on how the CP and the ISP share the payments. We include in our model a possible asymmetric weighting parameter (that varies between zero to one). We also study equilibria that arise when one of the CPs colludes with the ISP. We also study two dynamic game models and study the convergence of prices to the equilibrium values.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figure

Generalising diagonal strict concavity property for uniqueness of Nash equilibrium

International audienceIn this paper, we extend the notion of diagonally strictly concave functions and use it to provide a sufficient condition for uniqueness of Nash equilibrium in some concave games. We then provide an alternative proof of the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium for a network resource allocation game arising from the so-called Kelly mechanism by verifying the new sufficient condition. We then establish that the equilibrium resulting from the differential pricing in the Kelly mechanism is related to a normalised Nash equilibrium of a game with coupled strategy space

Modeling and Simulation of Mobility of Crowds

International audienceMobility models studied in the networking community usually assume independence between the movement of individuals. While this may well model sparse networks, there are many scenarios that might not follow this assumption. In contrast, within other communities, such as road traffic engineering, biology and computer graphics, models of mobility usually take into account the dependence of the mobility pattern of an individual with respect to that of its neighbors. Our goal in this paper is to study how this dependence impacts the performance measure from the networking point of view. In particular, we implement a bio-inspired model for mobility of crowds and, by simulation, we study how mobility influences the performance measures of a distributed network. We perform statistical analysis on the samples obtained through simulations. In particular, we study the distribution of the message delivery time and show that it is light tailed, with exponential tail distribution

Analysis of spatial and economical effects in communication networks

Dans cette thèse, nous analysons les performances des réseaux de communication à l'aide d’approches issues de la théorie des jeux. Cette thèse se présente en deux parties. La première partie étudie la performance des réseaux ad-hoc, cellulaires et de transport en tenant compte d’effets spatiaux. La deuxième partie adresse des problématiques économiques dans les réseaux de communications, liées à la réglementation de la «neutralité du réseau». Ici, nous étudions la concurrence des prix ainsi que des mécanismes de partage des revenus entre fournisseurs de services réseau.Dans la première partie, nous utilisons des modèles de jeu d’accès canal (MAC) et jeu de brouillage pour étudier les performances d'un réseau mobile ad hoc (MANET), et de jeux de routage afin d'étudier les performances d'un réseau de transport. Dans les réseaux cellulaires, nous étudions l'effet de la réduction de la densité spatiale des stations de base sur la quantité de rayonnement au corps humain (réseau vert).Les considérations géométriques jouent un rôle important dans les performances des réseaux sans fils. Par exemple, la position des nœuds affecte le niveau des interférences. Dans les MANETS, la mobilité des nœuds conduit à une observation différente du niveau d’interférences provenant de leurs voisins, et aussi due à la nature décentralisée du réseau, les utilisateurs peuvent adopter un comportement égoïste dans le partage des ressources. Afin de modéliser les propriétés géométriques du réseau ainsi que le comportement égoïste des utilisateurs, nous utilisons la géométrie stochastique et la théorie des jeux. Notre travail a développé un mécanisme de tarification et a montré qu’en définissant un prix approprié, tous les utilisateurs pouvaient être amenés à recevoir une part équitable des ressources conduisant à un optimal global des performances du réseau. Nous considérons aussi une configuration antagoniste où certain nœuds tendent à dégrader les performances du réseau en brouillant les communications des autres nœuds du réseau. Dans la deuxième partie de la thèse, nous étudions des aspects économiques dans les réseaux communication. Les représentants de plusieurs fournisseurs d'accès Internet (ISP) ont exprimé leur souhait de voir un changement important dans les politiques de tarification de l'Internet. En particulier, ils aimeraient voir les fournisseurs de contenu (CP) payer pour l'utilisation du réseau, compte tenu de la grande quantité de ressources qu'ils utilisent. Ce qui serait une violation flagrante du «principe de neutralité des réseaux» qui a caractérisé le développement de l'Internet filaire. La thèse a étudiée la possibilité de l’introduction d’un régulateur facilitant les interactions monétaires entre les ISP et les CP dans un régime non neutre. En utilisant des outils issus de la théorie des jeux et de la conception de mécanismes, nous avons développé deux mécanismes de négociation décidant des paiements entre les ISPs et CPs. Nous montrons que si les joueurs négocient avant de fixer les prix d’accès des utilisateurs finaux, ceci conduit à un équilibre favorable où tous les joueurs ressortent gagnant. Nous considérons également le cas où certains CPs établissent des contrats d’exclusivités avec les ISP afin d’obtenir des traitements préférentiels et en étudions l’impact sur les fournisseurs d’accès et les utilisateurs finaux. Avec la croissance du commerce de l’internet, la régulation des interactions monétaires entre différents fournisseurs de services est inévitable. Notre travail fournit des lignes directrices importantes sur la façon dont l'Internet doit être réglementé de telle sorte que les intérêts des utilisateurs finaux sont protégésIn this thesis we analyze the performance of communication networks using game theoretic approaches. The thesis is in two parts. The first part studies the performance of Ad hoc, cellular and transportation networks taking into consideration spatial effects. The second part studies economic issues in the communication networks related to the `net neutrality' regulations. Here we study price competition and revenue sharing mechanisms between the network service providers.In the first part, we use Medium Access Control (MAC) game and Jamming game models to study the performance of a Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET), and routing games to study the performance of a transportation network. In the cellular networks, we study the effect of reducing the spatial density of base stations on the amount of radiation to human body (green networking). Geometric aspects play an important role in the performance of wireless networks. For example, node locations affect the amount of interference. In MANETs, the mobility results in users experiencing different amount of interference from their neighbors, and also due to decentralized nature of the network the users can be selfish in sharing the resources. To model the geometrical properties of the network and selfish behavior of the users we used stochastic geometry and game theory. Our work developed a pricing mechanism and showed that with an `appropriate' price all the users can be made to get a fair share of the resources resulting in global optimal network performance. We also considered an adversarial setting where some of the nodes aim to degrade the performance of the network by jamming other nodes’ transmissions.In the second part of the thesis, we study economics aspects in communication networks. Representatives of several Internet access providers (ISPs) have expressed their wish to see a substantial change in the Internet pricing policies. In particular, they would like to see content providers (CPs) pay for use of the network, given the large amount of resources they use. This would be in clear violation of the ``net neutrality'' principle that had characterized the development of the wireline Internet. The thesis explored possibility of a regulator facilitating monetary interactions between the ISPs and CPs in a nonneutral regime. Using tools from game theory and mechanism design we developed two bargaining mechanisms to decide payments between the ISPs and CPs. We showed that if the players bargain before they set the access prices for end users, it results in a favorable equilibrium where every player benefits. We also considered the case where some of CPs make exclusive contracts with the ISPs to get preferential treatment and studied its impact on both the service providers and the end users.As the Internet commerce grows, regulation of the monetary interaction between various service providers is unavoidable. Our work provides important policy guidelines on how the Internet should be regulated such that the end users' interests are protecte