Control and economics in networking, via optimization: Perspectives from an emerging discipline

This paper describes a developing field of research in which control, networking and economic theory are interacting at an unprecedented level of depth, over problems of network resource allocation. Networking provides a large scale application with fully embedded decentralized control systems, and users with competing objectives; economics brings market tools to understand this decentralization of decision makers and objectives; control theory brings the dynamic viewpoint to fields accustomed to the equilibrium perspective. The key to a more unified theory is the language of convex optimization. We will describe a prototype problem and its current understanding through a combination of the above viewpoints, and outline other directions of development of this fertile interaction.