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Packet-switched communication networks such as today's Internet are built with several interconnected core and distribution packet forwarding routers and several sender and sink transport agents. In order to maintain stability and avoid congestion collapse in the network, the sources control their rate behavior and voluntarily adjust their sending rates to accommodate other sources in the network. In this thesis, we study one class of sender rate control that is modeled using continuous first-order differential equation of the sending rates. In order to adjust the rates appropriately, the network sends continuous packet-loss feedback to the sources. We study a form of closed-loop feedback congestion controllers whose rate adjustments exhibit a nonlinear form. There are three dimensions to our work in this thesis. First, we study the network optimization problem in which sources choose utilities to maximize their underlying throughput. Each sender maximizes its utility proportional to the throughput achieved. In our model, sources choose a utility function to define their level of satisfaction of the underlying resource usages. The objective of this direction is to establish the properties of source utility functions using inequality constrained bounded sets and study the functional forms of utilities against a chosen rate differential equation. Second, stability of the network and tolerance to perturbation are two essential factors that keep communication networks operational around the equilibrium point. Our objective in this part of the thesis is to analytically understand the existence of local asymptotic stability of delayed-feedback systems under homogeneous network delays. Third, we propose a novel tangential controller for a generic maximization function and study its properties using nonlinear optimization techniques. We develop the necessary theoretical background and the properties of our controller to prove that it is a better rate adaptation algorithm for logarithmic utilities compared to the well-studied proportional controllers. We establish the asymptotic local stability of our controller with upper bounds on the increase / decrease gain parameters.

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Controllability and stabilisability are two fundamental properties of control systems and it is intuitively appealing to conjecture that the former should imply the latter; especially so when the state of a control system is assumed to be known at every time instant. Such an implication can, indeed, be proven for certain types of controllability and stabilisability, and certain classes of control systems. In the present thesis, we consider real analytic control systems of the form $\Sgr:\dot{x}=f(x,u)$, with $x$ in a real analytic manifold and $u$ in a separable metric space, and we show that, under mild technical assumptions, small-time local controllability from an equilibrium $p$ of \Sgr\ implies the existence of a piecewise analytic feedback \Fscr\ that asymptotically stabilises \Sgr\ at $p$. As a corollary to this result, we show that nonlinear control systems with controllable unstable dynamics and stable uncontrollable dynamics are feedback stabilisable, extending, thus, a classical result of linear control theory. Next, we modify the proof of the existence of \Fscr\ to show stabilisability of small-time locally controllable systems in finite time, at the expense of obtaining a closed-loop system that may not be Lyapunov stable. Having established stabilisability in finite time, we proceed to prove a converse-Lyapunov theorem. If \Fscr\ is a piecewise analytic feedback that stabilises a small-time locally controllable system \mbox{$\Sgr:\dot{x}=f(x,u)$} in finite time, then the Lyapunov function we construct has the interesting property of being differentiable along every trajectory of the closed-loop system obtained by ``applying" \Fscr\ to \Sgr. We conclude this thesis with a number of open problems related to the stabilisability of nonlinear control systems, along with a number of examples from the literature that hint at potentially fruitful lines of future research in the area. / Thesis (Ph.D, Mathematics & Statistics) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-24 10:24:22.51

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