Selfish routing

Selfish Routing ( English as "selfish Transfer") refers to a strategy for distributing packets in a computer network such as the Internet. Each participant in the network only has limited knowledge about the nature of the entire network and always acts selfishly. If an equilibrium is established in this way, one speaks of a Nash equilibrium . The ratio of the cost in a Nash equilibrium to the cost of an optimal solution is called the price of stability or the price of anarchy .

For the formal investigation, the network is modeled as a graph . Each node represents an actor and each edge a connection between two actors. The edges are weighted with a cost function. The price of stability then depends on the nature of the cost function.

See also

• Braess paradox
• Game theory

Web links

• Tim Roughgarden: Selfish Routing . Dissertation (PDF; 909 kB).

literature

• Tim Roughgarden : Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy . MIT Press 2005.