Money-Based Coordination of Network Packets

In this work, we apply a common economic tool, namely money, to coordinate network packets. In particular, we present a network economy, called PacketEconomy, where each flow is modeled as a population of rational network packets, and these packets can self-regulate their access to network resources by mutually trading their positions in router queues. We consider a corresponding Markov model of trade and show that there are Nash equilibria (NE) where queue positions and money are exchanged directly between the network packets. This simple approach, interestingly, delivers significant improvements for packets and routers.