Mechanisms for Internet Routing: A Study

摘要

In this paper, we address the issue of Routing in the Internet from a Game Theoretic perspective. We adopt a two-pronged strategy: firstly, we revisit two 'classic' models of the Nash equilibria of a network of selfish flows in the Internet and extend their results for Nash equilibria to what we believe are more realistic settings (for example, we present results for non- linear latency functions). Secondly, we apply our results, as well as the 'classic' results, for Nash equilibria to designing Routing schemes for networks. The goal of such schemes is not to price network usage but rather to ensure sound overall network performance in the presence of greedy behavior of the participating flows. Finally, we show how our results can be employed to build a Wide-Area routing scheme.