Resource-Aware Control via Dynamic Pricing for Congestion Game with Finite-Time Guarantees

Abstract: Congestion game is a widely used model for modern networked applications. A central issue in such applications is that the selfish behavior of the participants may result in resource overloading and negative externalities for the system participants. In this work, we propose a pricing mechanism that guarantees the sub-linear increase of the time-cumulative violation of the resource load constraints. The feature of our method is that it is resource-centric in the sense that it depends on the congestion state of the resources and not on specific characteristics of the system participants. This feature makes our mechanism scalable, flexible, and privacy-preserving. Moreover, we show by numerical simulations that our pricing mechanism has no significant effect on the agents' welfare in contrast to the improvement of the capacity violation.