Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Resource Sharing in Networks: A Delay Perspective

From multi-description/multi-path routing for multi-media applications to content distribution in P2P networks, to community networking, many forms of resource sharing have been proposed to improve network performance. From the perspective of any single user, when ignoring the interaction among users, all such schemes reduce to various forms of providing parallelism and, hence, increased throughput. Focusing on parallelism is by no means sufficient as it ignores the existence of many users with potentially similar strategies. In this paper, we focus instead on the delay performance of a multi-user system where resources are shared.