An evolutionary game approach for the design of congestion control protocols in wireless networks

Evolutionary games have been developed in biological sciences in the aim of studying the evolution and equilibrium behavior (called evolutionary stable strategies - ESS) of large populations. While rich theoretical foundations of evolutionary games allow biologist to explain past and present evolution and predict future evolution, it can be further used in engineering to architect evolution. In this paper, we apply evolutionary games to non-cooperative networks containing large number of individual non-cooperative terminals or sensors. We study the evolution of congestion control protocols, and show how the evolution and the ESS are influenced by the characteristics of the wireless channel. We then consider the challenge of architecting the evolution: we propose some guidelines for designing a framework that supports evolution of protocols.