Sharing Network Resources (Paperback)

Resource Allocation lies at the heart of network control. In the early days of the Internet the scarcest resource was bandwidth, but as the network has evolved to become an essential utility in the lives of billions, the nature of the resource allocation problem has changed. This book attempts to describe the facets of resource allocation that are most relevant to modern networks. It is targeted at graduate students and researchers who have an introductory background in networking and who desire to internalize core concepts before designing new protocols and applications.

We start from the fundamental question: what problem does network resource allocation solve? This leads us, in Chapter 1, to examine what it means to satisfy a set of user applications that have different requirements of the network, and to problems in Social Choice Theory. We find that while capturing these preferences in terms of utility is clean and rigorous, there are significant limitations to this choice. Chapter 2 focuses on sharing divisible resources such as links and spectrum. Both of these resources are somewhat atypical -- a link is most accurately modeled as a queue in our context, but this leads to the analytical intractability of queueing theory, and spectrum allocation methods involve dealing with interference, a poorly understood phenomenon. Chapters 3 and 4 are introductions to two allocation workhorses: auctions and matching. In these chapters we allow the users to game the system (i.e., to be strategic), but don't allow them to collude. In Chapter 5, we relax this restriction and focus on collaboration. Finally, in Chapter 6, we discuss the theoretical yet fundamental issue of stability. Here, our contribution is mostly on making a mathematically abstruse subdiscipline more accessible without losing too much generality.

“This book is beautifully written and will be a major resource for graduate students and researchers. I plan to have my graduate students read it, both for its intellectual content and the elegant presentation.”

Professor R. Srikant
Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“This is a very nice book. I look forward to seeing it published and using it in my future offerings of courses on network economics.”

Professor Jianwei Huang
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

“I commend the authors for having successfully brought a diverse set of analytical tools developed in last 30 years from research communities such as economics and operations research into a networking textbook. I am particularly impressed that the authors are able to make these cutting-edge tools accessible to engineering students with little sacrifice for their mathematical rigor and generality.”

Jim Dai
Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Cornell University
The Chandler Family Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology (on leave)

“This is indeed a fascinating book, containing many nice results (both classical and new). It covers several key aspects of sharing network resources that are not usually covered in a typical networking book. Mostly based on mathematical models, the book deals with principles instead of protocol details.”

Libin Jiang
Qualcomm Research

資源分配是網路控制的核心。在互聯網的早期，最稀缺的資源是頻寬，但隨著網路演變成億萬人生活中不可或缺的公共設施，資源分配問題的性質也發生了變化。本書試圖描述與現代網路最相關的資源分配方面。它針對具有網路初步背景並希望在設計新協議和應用程序之前內化核心概念的研究生和研究人員。

我們從基本問題開始：網路資源分配解決了什麼問題？這導致我們在第1章中研究了滿足具有不同網路需求的用戶應用程序的含義，以及社會選擇理論中的問題。我們發現，雖然用效用來捕捉這些偏好是乾淨而嚴謹的，但這種選擇存在顯著的限制。第2章專注於共享可分割資源，如連結和頻譜。這兩種資源都有些特殊 - 在我們的情境中，連結最準確地被建模為一個隊列，但這導致了隊列理論的分析難題，而頻譜分配方法涉及處理一個不太理解的干擾現象。第3章和第4章是兩個分配工具的介紹：拍賣和匹配。在這些章節中，我們允許用戶操縱系統（即具有策略性），但不允許他們串通。在第5章中，我們放寬了這個限制，專注於合作。最後，在第6章中，我們討論了理論上卻很基本的穩定問題。在這裡，我們的貢獻主要是使一個數學上晦澀的子學科更易於理解，同時不失去太多的普遍性。

“這本書寫得很好，將成為研究生和研究人員的重要資源。我計劃讓我的研究生閱讀它，既因為其知識內容，也因為其優雅的呈現方式。”
R. Srikant教授
伊利諾伊大學香檳分校弗雷德里克·G·和伊麗莎白·H·尼爾斯基金教授

“這是一本非常好的書。我期待著它的出版，並在未來的網路經濟課程中使用它。”
黃建偉教授
香港中文大學

“我讚揚作者成功地將過去30年來在經濟學和運營研究等研究社區中發展的多樣化分析工具引入到網路教科書中。我尤其對作者能夠使這些尖端工具對工程學生更易於理解而不失數學嚴謹性和普遍性印象深刻。”
Jim Dai教授
康奈爾大學運營研究和信息工程教授，喬治亞理工學院工業和系統工程Chandler家族講座教授（休假中）

“這確實是一本迷人的書，包含許多精彩的結果（經典和新的）。它涵蓋了在典型的網路書籍中通常不涉及的幾個共享網路資源的關鍵方面。基於數學模型，本書處理的是原則而不是協議細節。”
江立斌
高通研究