communications

About twenty-five years ago a spelunker was lost in a Pennsylvania cave system. A mathematician at Pennsylvania State University was asked to help design an efficient search of the cave system. This mathematician happened to be a graph theorist and as a cave system may be modelled as a graph, it led him to introduce the general problem of searching graphs.

Game Theory studies the phenomena occurring when independent, autonomous entities, called agents or users, act selfishly; game theoretic techniques are now being used to model and analyze networks. This project aims to develop a more realistic modelling of communication and data networks of selfish users using game-theoretic models, study the effects that selfish behaviour has on the overall network performance, and the designs of networks which prevent the rapid degradation of the performance due to such behaviour.

In today’s highly connected world in which data is so easy to collect, search, and transfer, privacy is of increasing importance. Unfortunately, the way most communication happens today - particularly over the Internet - is quite privacy unfriendly. When you send email, use instant messaging, or simply browse the world-wide web, information about you and your actions gets disseminated to diverse parties around the world, and you have little, if any, control over it.