Multi-user rate-based flow control with action delays: a team-theoretic approach

We develop a methodology, based on control-theoretic tools, to design decentralized rate-based flow controllers with some optimality properties. An important issue that arises here is one of action delays: it takes time from the moment control information is sent to a source, until an action is taken by it, and until subsequently that action affects the state of the switch that had initiated that information. In the presence of such action delays, we obtain an explicit solution to the flow control problem within the framework of decentralized LQG (linear-quadratic-Gaussian) team theory and by invoking some certainty equivalence. Simulation examples illustrate the analytical results.