Cache Me If You Can: Capacitated Selfish Replication Games in Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces and analyzes Capacitated Selfish Replication (CSR) games in networks, providing polynomial algorithms for hierarchical networks under specific utility constraints and proving NP-hardness of equilibrium existence in general cases.

Contribution

The work formulates CSR games with capacity limits, offers an exact polynomial-time algorithm for hierarchical networks under utility constraints, and establishes NP-hardness results for general network scenarios.

Findings

Polynomial-time algorithm for hierarchical networks under utility constraints

NP-hardness of equilibrium existence in general CSR games

Framework accommodates diverse utility functions and network structures

Abstract

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network systems, content (object) delivery between nodes is often required. One way to study such a distributed system is by defining games, which involve selfish nodes that make strategic choices on replicating content in their local limited memory (cache) or accessing content from other nodes for a cost. These Selfish Replication games have been introduced in [8] for nodes that do not have any capacity limits, leaving the capacitated problem, i.e. Capacitated Selfish Replication (CSR) games, open. In this work, we first form the model of the CSR games, for which we perform a Nash equilibria analysis. In particular, we focus on hierarchical networks, given their extensive use to model communication costs of content delivery in P2P systems. We present an exact polynomial-time algorithm for any hierarchical network, under two constraints on the utility functions: 1) "Nearer is better", i.e. the closest the content is to the node the less its access cost is, and 2) "Independence of irrelevant alternatives", i.e. aggregation of individual node preferences. This generalization represents a vast class of utilities and more interestingly allows each of the nodes to have simultaneously completely different functional forms of utility functions. In this general framework, we present CSR games results on arbitrary networks and outline the boundary between intractability and effective computability in terms of the network structure, object preferences, and the total number of objects. Moreover, we prove that the problem of equilibria existence becomes NP-hard for general CSR games.