A multi-agent based bandwidth allocation scheme

Hereafter, more and more network providers will be established by the introduction of the open telecommunications market. At this time, it is necessary to guarantee the fair competition between these network providers. In this paper, a negotiation scheme for the bandwidth allocation is proposed. This negotiation scheme is based on the concept of open competitive bidding and can guarantee the fair competition between the network providers. In this negotiation scheme, each network provider's objective is to maximize its obtained profit. On the other hand each user's objective is to select a network provider which supply as much amount of resource as he or she requires. By this negotiation scheme, the users and the network providers can select each other based on their objectives. In this paper, adaptation strategies which the network providers and the users can adopt under the proposed bandwidth allocation framework are also discussed. Network provider which adopts this strategy can obtain enough profit even when the number of connection requests is small compared with the idle bandwidth capacity, and user who adopts this strategy can certainly obtain a resource even when the idle bandwidth capacity is small compared with the number of connection requests.