EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Balancing Load via Small Coalitions in Selfish Ring Routing Games

Xujin Chen (), Xiaodong Hu () and Weidong Ma ()
Additional contact information
Xujin Chen: Institute of Applied Mathematics, AMSS, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China
Xiaodong Hu: Institute of Applied Mathematics, AMSS, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China
Weidong Ma: Institute of Applied Mathematics, AMSS, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P. R. China

Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research (APJOR), 2015, vol. 32, issue 01, 1-27

Abstract: This paper concerns the asymmetric atomic selfish routing game for load balancing in ring networks. In the selfish routing, each player selects a path in the ring network to route one unit traffic between its source and destination nodes, aiming at a minimum maximum link load along its own path. The selfish path selections by individuals ignore the system objective of minimizing the maximum load over all network links. This selfish ring load (SRL) game arises in a wide variety of applications in decentralized network routing, where network performance is often measured by the price of anarchy (PoA), the worst-case ratio between the maximum link loads in an equilibrium routing and an optimal routing. It has been known that the PoA of SRL with respect to classical Nash Equilibrium (NE) cannot be upper bounded by any constant, showing large loss of efficiency at some NE outcome.In an effort to improve the network performance in the SRL game, we generalize the model to so-called SRL with collusion (SRLC) which allows coordination within any coalition of up to k selfish players on the condition that every player of the coalition benefits from the coordination. We prove that, for m-player game on n-node ring, the PoA of SRLC is n - 1 when k ≤ 2, drops to 2 when k = 3 and is at least 1 + 2/m for k ≥ 4. Our study shows that on one hand, the performance of ring networks, in terms of maximum load, benefits significantly from coordination of self-interested players within small-sized coalitions; on the other hand, the equilibrium routing in SRL might not reach global optimum even if any number of players can coordinate.

Keywords: Selfish routing; bottleneck congestion game; load balancing; ring networks; k-strong equilibrium; price of anarchy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217595915400035
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:apjorx:v:32:y:2015:i:01:n:s0217595915400035

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217595915400035

Access Statistics for this article

Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research (APJOR) is currently edited by Gongyun Zhao

More articles in Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research (APJOR) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:wsi:apjorx:v:32:y:2015:i:01:n:s0217595915400035