A real world network pricing game with less severe Braess' Paradox

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pricing mechanism inspired by real-world internet architecture that mitigates the severity of Braess' Paradox in selfish routing networks, ensuring Nash equilibria and bounded inefficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new pricing mechanism based on internet graph properties that reduces Braess' Paradox effects in non-cooperative routing games.

Findings

Nash equilibria are proven to exist under the proposed pricing scheme.

Bounds on the inefficiency caused by selfish routing are established.

The mechanism leverages internet's graphical structure to improve network performance.

Abstract

Internet and graphs are very much related. The graphical structure of internet has been studied extensively to provide efficient solutions to routing and other problems. But most of these studies assume a central authority which controls and manages the internet. In the recent years game theoretic models have been proposed which do not require a central authority and the users are assumed to be routing their flows selfishly. The existence of Nash Equilibria, congestion and the amount of inefficiency caused by this selfish routing is a major concern in this field. A type of paradox in the selfish routing networks, Braess' Paradox, first discovered by Braess, is a major contributor to inefficiency. Several pricing mechanisms have also been provided which give a game theoretical model between users(consumers) and ISPs ({Internet Service Providers} or sellers) for the internet. We propose a novel pricing mechanism, based on real world Internet network architecture, which reduces the severity of Braess' Paradox in selfish routing game theoretic networks. It's a pricing mechanism between combinatorial users and ISPs. We prove that Nash equilibria exists in this network and provide bounds on inefficiency . We use graphical properties of internet to prove our result. Several interesting extensions and future work have also been discussed.