AIMD in a discrete time implementation or with a non-constant shared resource

Abstract

The additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm, that is commonly used for congestion avoidance in communication networks, has recently been suggested in other fields such as load management in electric power networks. As for congestion avoidance, in such systems a large number of agents are required to share a given resource. In recent work by Shorten, Wirth and Leith on congestion control in networking a stochastic model has been developed to analyse AIMD algorithms. However, the analysis assumes a continuous implementation of the algorithm and a constant available resource. These assumptions are no longer useful if the AIMD algorithm is applied in fields such as load management in electric power networks, where a discrete implementation is often required, and the available resource shared may be inherently variable. In this paper we develop a disturbed AIMD model based on the model introduced by Shorten et al. that includes discrete time implementation and time varying resource availability. Further, we use that model to bound the influence of these disturbances, caused by either a discrete implementation or small variations in the available resource.