Computational Mechanism Design for Allocating Tactical Network Bandwidth

Centralized resource allocation becomes problematic as systems grow in scale and complexity. A centralized decision maker must know what is needed at any time by all the a system, including its user parts. At some point, the diversity and number of tasks that a system must perform makes this kind of omniscience impossible. If omniscience cant be achieved, a centralized decision maker must rely on the system parts to truthfully report their needs. However, assuming that a systems human parts will behave truthfully is naive; where humans are involved, self interest invariably follows, and self interest is not always consistent with truth telling. Bandwidth allocation in tactical data networks is one setting in which this problem is manifest.