The Price of Anarchy (POA) of network coding and routing based on average pricing mechanism

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the efficiency loss in network resource sharing when using an average cost pricing mechanism, showing that network coding offers limited improvements in the price of anarchy compared to routing alone.

Contribution

It characterizes the worst-case efficiency bounds of network coding and routing games under ACS pricing, revealing limited benefits of network coding for efficiency.

Findings

POA is at least 50% with routing only

POA drops to 4/9 when both coding and routing are used

Users tend to prefer network coding for better resource utilization

Abstract

The congestion pricing is an efficient allocation approach to mediate demand and supply of network resources. Different from the previous pricing using Affine Marginal Cost (AMC), we focus on studying the game between network coding and routing flows sharing a single link when users are price anticipating based on an Average Cost Sharing (ACS) pricing mechanism. We characterize the worst-case efficiency bounds of the game compared with the optimal, i.e., the price-of anarchy (POA), which can be low bound 50% with routing only. When both network coding and routing are applied, the POA can be as low as 4/9. Therefore, network coding cannot improve the POA significantly under the ACS. Moreover, for more efficient use of limited resources, it indicates the sharing users have a higher tendency to choose network coding.