Early Drop: A Packet-Dropping Incentive Rate Control Mechanism to Keep Data Fresh under Heterogeneous QoS Requirements

In this paper, we consider a distributed rate control problem with two selfish users. One user focuses on optimizing the data freshness while the other one aims at optimizing the “power” of throughput and the transmission delay. Two users aim at achieving their own goals by controlling the source sending rate. We formulate the problem as an uncooperative rate control game with two users and show that the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game is inefficient compared to the global optimum solution. To improve the efficiency, we propose a linear packet-dropping incentives in the uncooperative rate control game with two users, so that users are encouraged to control their rates near the global optimum sending rates. We show that the proposed incentives can improve the Price of Anarchy (PoA) performance.