A Genetic Algorithm for Solving the

First Price Sealed Bid Auction in

Communication Networks

Portilla-Figueras, S. Salcedo-Sanz, P. García-Díaz,

K. Hackbarth
Teoría de la Señal y Comunicaciones, Universidad de Alcalá
Ingeniería de Comunicaciones, Universidad de Cantabria

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 Index

 Intra-domain and Inter-domain Routing Problem

 Genetic Algorithms
 First Implementation
 Experiments and Results
 Conclusions

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 Routing Problem

 Two points of view:

 User-Services
 Internet traffic is growing at a very high rate.
 New broadband user, not only business but also residential
 New multimedia services “real time” demanding guaranteed QoS.

 Network operators
 Core network with enough capacity, but not the same in access.
 Free capacities that can be sold to ISP, Virtual Operatos or even
other network operators
 Interconnection problem to provide QoS Services.

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 Interdomain vs Intradomain
 Intradomain:  Interdomain
 We consider a single  We have to consider network of
administrative entity which different operators.
owns the network.  We have to establish
 It has to guarantee the QoS to agreements to meet the QoS
their customers, but obtaining requirements
the maximum benefit  Centralized or distributed
 Link to Route Scale approach.

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 Why Auctions?

 There is a current trend which applies economical concepts to

network design and optimization.
 It is based in game theory including auctions.
 The most suitable auction procedure for telecommunication
networks is based on Vickrey auctions:
 Incentive compatibility.
 Individual rationality.
 Efficiency.
 Even for very simple scenarios the problems gets NP-complex.

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 Genetic Algorithms

 Genetic algorithm are a family of computational models inspired by the

evolution.
 The “first” implementations was performed by J. Holland in 1975 which
is known as the Canonical Genetic Algorithm.
 Their encode a potential solution to a specific problem on a simple
“chromosome” data structure and applies some procedures (crossover,
mutation, elitism) to make it evolve.
 They can be seen as population based optimizers using a
corresponding fitness function which evaluates the goodness of the
solution.
 Why does it work?
 They consider the solution search space as hypercubes and the
chromosomes are hyperplane partitions of the hypercube
 Each time a “chromosome” is evaluated many hypercubes are evaluated in
an implicit parallel fashion.
 The cumulative effects of the hyperplane competitions (using the fitness
function) makes the algorithm converge towards the final solution.

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 Genetic Algorithms
 How it works?
 Generate a initial population, usually randomly.
 Evaluate the fitness of each individual of the population.
 Selection is applied to generate an intermediate population. Better
solutions have more possibilities or being selected to the next generation.
 Apply recombination (crossover) to generate the new population
 We also apply mutation to avoid fall in local minimums/maximums
 Evaluate the new fitnesses
 Repeat the process for all the generations.

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 Application of Genetic Algorithm
 Problem Codification  Utility Function
U i  a, c i    i  a   c i
If ci=0, we have the
Knapsack Problem

 Inelastic Demand Valuation Function

N i(ai)=iai<i.
 Fitness function, Maximize x p
i 1
i i

 Constraint, the capacity of the link, Q

N

x q
i 1
i i Q

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 Experiments & Results
 First Example (Only to see if it works)

 Second, a “real” case

Evolution of the Social Welfare

100
Benefit 91 80

Social Welfare
60
40
20
0
1 11 21 31 41 51 61 71 81 91
Generations

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 Conclusions

 Genetic algorithms have shown their capabilities to

solve auction based resource assignment problems
 Ok, we know that we are using too much algorithmic
power to such an easy problem.
 The work here is the starting point to tackle more
complex problems, specifically:
 Different types of user demands
 Different pricing schemes, (Vickrey)
 Defining a QoS route between two edge nodes.

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