Bottleneck routing games on grids

Costas Busch, Rajgopal Kannan, Alfred Samman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider routing games on grid network topologies. The social cost is the worst congestion in any of the network edges (bottleneck congestion). Each player's objective is to find a path that minimizes the bottleneck congestion in its path. We show that the price of anarchy in bottleneck games in grids is proportional to the number of bends β that the paths are allowed to take in the grids' space. We present games where the price of anarchy is Õ(β). We also give a respective lower bound of Ω(β) which shows that our upper bound is within only a poly-log factor from the best achievable price of anarchy. A significant impact of our analysis is that there exist bottleneck routing games with small number of bends which give a poly-log approximation to the optimal coordinated solution that may use an arbitrary number of bends. To our knowledge, this is the first tight analysis of bottleneck games on grids.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationGame Theory for Networks - Second International ICST Conference, GAMENETS 2011, Revised Selected Papers
Pages294-307
Number of pages14
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd International ICST Conference on Game Theory in Networks, GAMENETS 2011 - Shanghai, China
Duration: Apr 16 2011Apr 18 2011

Publication series

NameLecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
Volume75 LNICST
ISSN (Print)1867-8211

Conference

Conference2nd International ICST Conference on Game Theory in Networks, GAMENETS 2011
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period4/16/114/18/11

Keywords

  • algorithmic game theory
  • bottleneck games
  • grid networks
  • price of anarchy
  • routing games

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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