Bottleneck links, variable demand, and the tragedy of the commons

Abstract

We study the price of anarchy of selfish routing with variable traffic rates and when the path cost is a nonadditive function of the edge costs. Nonadditive path costs are important, for example, in networking applications, where a key performance metric is the achievable throughput along a path, which is controlled by its bottleneck (most congested) edge. We prove the following results. In multicommodity networks, the worst‐case price of anarchy under the ℓp path cost with 1 p ≤∞ can be dramatically larger than under the standard ℓ1 path cost.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2012
Source ID
10.1002/net.21458

Entities

People

  • Richard Cole
  • Tim Roughgarden
  • Yevgeniy Dodis

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Office of Naval Research

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking