On Nash equilibria in non-cooperative all-optical networks

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the problem in which an all-optical network provider must determine suitable payment functions for non-cooperative agents wishing to communicate so as to induce routings in Nash equilibrium using a low number of wavelengths. We assume three different information levels specifying the local knowledge that agents may exploit to compute their payments. While under complete information of all the agents and their routing strategies we show that functions can be determined that perform how centralized algorithms preserving their time complexity, knowing only the used wavelengths along connecting paths (minimal level) or along the edges (intermediate level) the most reasonable functions either do not admit equilibria or equilibria with a different color assigned to each agent, that is with the worst possible ratio between the Nash versus optimum performance, also called price of anarchy. However, by suitably restricting the network topology, a price of anarchy 25.72 has been obtained for chains and 51.44 for rings under the minimal level, and further reduced respectively to 3 and 6 under the intermediate level, up to additive factors converging to 0 as the load increases. Finally, again under the minimal level, a price of anarchy logarithmic in the number of agents has been determined also for trees. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.