Approximating Wardrop Equilibria with Finitely Many Agents

We study adaptive routing algorithms in a round-based model. Suppose we are given a network equipped with load-dependent latency functions on the edges and a set of commodities each of which is defined by a collection of paths (represented by a DAG) and a flow rate. Each commodity is controlled by an agent which aims at balancing its traffic among its paths such that all used paths have the same latency. Such an allocation is called a Wardrop equilibrium. In recent work, it was shown that an infinite population of users each of which carries an infinitesimal amount of traffic can attain approximate equilibria in a distributed and concurrent fashion quickly. Interestingly, the convergence time is independent of the underlying graph and depends only mildly on the latency functions. Unfortunately, a direct simulation of this process requires to maintain an exponential number of variables, one for each path. The focus of this work lies on the distributed and efficient computation of th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WDAG
• Authors: Simon Fischer, Lars Olbrich, Berthold Vöcking
• Keywords: Adaptive Routing Algorithms, Algorithms, Latency Functions, Load-dependent Latency Functions, WDAG 2007