This paper analyses environmental and socio-economic barriers for plantation activities on local and regional level and investigates the potential for carbon finance to stimulate the increased rates ...of forest plantation on wasteland, i.e., degraded lands, in southern India. Building on multidisciplinary field work and results from the model GCOMAP, the aim is to (1) identify and characterize the barriers to plantation activities in four agro-ecological zones in the state of Karnataka and (2) investigate what would be required to overcome these barriers and enhance the plantation rate and productivity. The results show that a rehabilitation of the wasteland based on plantation activities is not only possible but also anticipated by the local population and would lead to positive environmental and socio-economic effects at a local level. However, in many cases, the establishment of plantation activities is hindered by a lack of financial resources, low land productivity and water scarcity. Based on the model used and the results from the field work, it can be concluded that certified emission reductions such as carbon credits or other compensatory systems may help to overcome the financial barrier; however, the price needs to be significantly increased if these measures are to have any large-scale impact.
We consider selfish sources that send updates to a monitor over a shared wireless access. The sources would like to minimize the age of their information at the monitor. Our goal is to devise ...strategies that incentivize such sources to use the shared spectrum cooperatively. Earlier work has modeled such a setting using a non-cooperative one-shot game, played over a single access slot, and has shown that under certain access settings the dominant strategy of each source is to transmit in any slot, resulting in packet collisions between the sources' transmissions and causing all of them to be decoded in error at the monitor. We capture the interaction of the sources over an infinitely many medium access slots using infinitely repeated games. We investigate strategies that enable cooperation resulting in an efficient use of the wireless access, while disincentivizing any source from unilaterally deviating from the strategy. Formally, we are interested in strategies that are a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE). We begin by investigating the properties of the one-stage (slot) optimal and access-fair correlated strategies. We then consider their many-slot variants, the age-fair and access-fair strategies, in the infinitely repeated game model. We prove that the access-fair and age-fair strategies are SPNEs for when collision slots are longer than successful transmission slots. Otherwise, neither is a SPNE. We end with simulations that shed light on a possible SPNE for the latter case.
Consumers of Internet content typically pay an Internet Service Provider
(ISP) to connect to the Internet. A content provider (CP) may charge consumers
for its content or may earn via advertising ...revenue. In such settings, a matter
of continuing debate, under the umbrella of net neutrality regulations, is
whether an ISP serving a consumer may in addition charge the CPs not directly
connected to the ISP for delivering their content to consumers connected to the
ISP. We attempt an answer by looking at the problem through the lens of a
regulator whose mandate is to maximize the cumulative welfare of ISPs, CPs, and
consumers.
Specifically, we consider a two-sided market model, in which a local monopoly
ISP prices Internet access to consumers and possibly to CPs as well. The CPs
then decide whether to enter a competitive but differentiated market and the
consumers decide whether to connect to the ISP. Unlike prior works, we model
competition between the CPs together with consumer valuation of content and
quality-of-service provided by the ISP. We do so by using a novel fusion of
classical spatial differentiation models, namely the Hotelling and the Salop
models, in addition to simple queue theoretic delay modeling. Via extensive
simulations, we show that the equilibrium in the non-neutral setting that
allows an ISP to charge a CP welfare-dominates the neutral equilibrium.
We investigate the coexistence of an age optimizing network (AON) and a throughput optimizing network (TON) that share a common spectrum band. We consider two modes of long run coexistence: (a) ...networks compete with each other for spectrum access, causing them to interfere and (b) networks cooperate to achieve non-interfering access. To model competition, we define a non-cooperative stage game parameterized by the average age of the AON at the beginning of the stage, derive its mixed strategy Nash equilibrium (MSNE), and analyze the evolution of age and throughput over an infinitely repeated game in which each network plays the MSNE at every stage. Cooperation uses a coordination device that performs a coin toss during each stage to select the network that must access the medium. Networks use the grim trigger punishment strategy, reverting to playing the MSNE every stage forever if the other disobeys the device. We determine if there exists a subgame perfect equilibrium, i.e., the networks obey the device forever as they find cooperation beneficial. We show that networks choose to cooperate only when they consist of a sufficiently small number of nodes, otherwise they prefer to disobey the device and compete.
Real-time monitoring applications have Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices sense and communicate information (status updates) to a monitoring facility. Such applications desire the status updates ...available at the monitor to be fresh and would like to minimize the age of delivered updates. Networks of such devices may share wireless spectrum with WiFi networks. Often, they use a CSMA/CA based medium access similar to WiFi. However, unlike them, a WiFi network would like to provide high throughputs for its users. We model the coexistence of such networks as a repeated game with two players, an age optimizing network (AON) and a throughput optimizing network (TON), where an AON aims to minimize the age of updates and a TON seeks to maximize throughput. We define the stage game, parameterized by the average age of the AON at the beginning of the stage, and derive its mixed strategy Nash equilibrium (MSNE). We study the evolution of the equilibrium strategies over time, when players play the MSNE in each stage, and the resulting average discounted payoffs of the networks. It turns out that it is more favorable for a TON to share spectrum with an AON in comparison to sharing with another TON. The key to this lies in the MSNE strategy of the AON that occasionally refrains all its nodes from transmitting during a stage. Such stages allow the TON competition free access to the medium.
We consider a network of selfish nodes that would like to minimize the age of their updates at the other nodes. The nodes send their updates over a shared spectrum using a CSMA/CA based access ...mechanism. We model the resulting competition as a non-cooperative one-shot multiple access game and investigate equilibrium strategies for two distinct medium access settings (a) collisions are shorter than successful transmissions and (b) collisions are longer. We investigate competition in a CSMA/CA slot, where a node may choose to transmit or stay idle. We find that medium access settings exert strong incentive effects on the nodes. We show that when collisions are shorter, transmit is a weakly dominant strategy. This leads to all nodes transmitting in the CSMA/CA slot, therefore guaranteeing a collision. In contrast, when collisions are longer, no weakly dominant strategy exists and under certain conditions on the ages at the beginning of the slot, we derive the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium.
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