Designing virus-resistant, high-performance networks: a game-formation approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic approach to designing virus-resistant, high-performance networks, analyzing equilibrium states and efficiency loss to guide decentralized network formation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel game-formation model balancing cost, virus resistance, and performance, and analyzes its equilibria and efficiency loss.

Findings

Nash Equilibria and Price of Anarchy are characterized.

Price of Anarchy is generally low, indicating efficient decentralized formation.

Guidelines are provided for cases with high PoA requiring centralized intervention.

Abstract

Designing an optimal network topology while balancing multiple, possibly conflicting objectives like cost, performance, and resiliency to viruses is a challenging endeavor, let alone in the case of decentralized network formation. We therefore propose a game-formation technique where each player aims to minimize its cost in installing links, the probability of being infected by a virus and the sum of hopcounts on its shortest paths to all other nodes. In this article, we (1) determine the Nash Equilibria and the Price of Anarchy for our novel network formation game, (2) demonstrate that the Price of Anarchy (PoA) is usually low, which suggests that (near-)optimal topologies can be formed in a decentralized way, and (3) give suggestions for practitioners for those cases where the PoA is high and some centralized control/incentives are advisable.