A balance of power principle for decentralized resource sharing

Abstract In a seminal 1978 paper Kleinrock (1979), Professor Leonard Kleinrock (“Kleinrock”) derived “rules of thumb” for flow-control, using a “power” metric of delay-throughput tradeoffs. This work stimulated a stream of, still on-going (e.g., Canzian et al., 2013), flow-control researches. A particularly challenging question, still widely open, has been: how can networks optimize a global performance index, such as power and through decentralized actions? At the same time, my Ph.D. thesis, under Len’s guidance, introduced microeconomic techniques for decentralized control of channel access schemes (Yemini and Kleinrock, 1979). This research too, continues to attract current interest (e.g., Chang et al., 2013). This paper introduces a generalized “power” metric for decentralized resource allocation, and uses it to derive novel Balance-of-Power principles, for Pareto optimal allocations. These principles substantially generalize and unify the results of Kleinrock (1979) and Yemini and Kleinrock (1979), as well as successor works, while shedding new light on resource sharing mechanisms in current virtual and cloud systems.