Avoiding paradoxes in multi-agent competitive routing

Abstract

Strange behavior may occur in networks due to the non-cooperative nature of decision making, when the latter are taken by individual agents. In particular, the well known Braess paradox illustrates that when upgrading a network by adding a link, the resulting equilibrium may exhibit larger delays for all users. We present here some guidelines to avoid the Braess paradox when upgrading a network. We furthermore present conditions for the delays to be monotone increasing in the total demand.

Mathematical Based Models for Group Decision Support in Telecommunication Network Design and Management—Challenges and Trends

“…An extension of this theoretical result to other networking contexts was carried out by other authors, such as [73,74], and, for loss networks, in [75,76]. [77] review this problematic and propose forms of avoiding the Braess paradoxical situation when upgrading a communication network for a general payoff function for each user (utility or cost function). Note that some models of channel assignment in wireless networks with multiple domains such as in [52], also enable the joint calculation of end-to-end transmission routes.…”

Equilibria of channel selection games in parallel multiple access channels

“…That is, by letting the players to choose from a larger set of options, their individual benefit reduces. Recently, the Braess-type paradox has been also associated with the reduction of the sumutility instead of the individual utilities, as in [20,25,34] in the wireless communications arena.…”

“…That is, by letting the players to choose from a larger set of options, their individual benefit reduces. Recently, the Braess-type paradox has been also associated with the reduction of the sum-utility instead of the individual utilities, as in [22], [23], [33] in the wireless communications arena. In our particular case, the set of actions for player k in the game G (b) , is a subset of its set of actions in the game G (a) , i.e., ∀k ∈ K, P…”

La théorie des jeux non-coopératifs appliquée aux réseaux de télécommunication

“…En général, l'ensemble des stratégies U i (u −i ) disponibles pour un joueur i quelconque dépend des actions d'autres joueurs. Nous avons vu une telle dépendance dans la formulation (3). Pour illustrer le besoin d'une telle définition, considérons l'exemple suivant.…”

“…Il est montré dans [37] qu'enéliminant la possibilité d'une source i d'envoyer ses taches au centre j = i, on peut réduire les délais moyens des deux flux des taches ! Afin d'éviter des situations qui pourraient entrainer le paradoxe de Braess, plusieurs règles ontétéélaborées et proposées [3,40] pour l'allocation de ressources dans les réseaux.…”