Selfish traffic allocation for server farms

We investigate the price of selfish routing in non-cooperative networks in terms of the coordination and bicriteria ratios in the recently introduced game theoretic network model of Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou. We present the first thorough study of this model for general, monotone families of cost functions and for cost functions from Queueing Theory. Our main results can be summarized as follows. ? We give a precise characterization of cost functions having a bounded/unbounded coordination ratio. For example, cost functions that describe the expected delay in queueing systems have an unbounded coordination ratio. ? We show that an unbounded coordination ratio implies additionally an extremely high performance degradation under bicriteria measures. We demonstrate that the price of selfish routing can be as high as a bandwidth degradation by a factor that is linear in the network size. ? We separate the game theoretic (integral) allocation model from the (fractional) flow model by d...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: STOC
• Authors: Artur Czumaj, Piotr Krysta, Berthold Vöcking
• Keywords: Algorithms, Cost Functions, Selfish Routing, STOC 2002, Unbounded Coordination Ratio