Multicast versus private flows: an efficient pricing scheme for congestion control

Abstract

In this paper, we suggest to use an auction scheme to share the available resource of a communication link among several flows, where several users may be interested in the same flow, like multicast/streaming sessions. The auction scheme we introduce is inspired by the previously defined multi-bid auctions, which have been designed to share the available capacity of a communication link among selfish users. We study precisely the behaviour of users, and establish that their best strategy is to actually reveal what the resource is worth to them. The efficiency of the resulting allocation in terms of social welfare is also proved.