Exploiting anarchy in networks: a game-theoretic approach to combining fairness and throughput

We propose a novel mechanism for routing and bandwidth allocation that exploits the selfish and rational behavior of flows in a network. Our mechanism leads to allocations that simultaneously optimize throughput and fairness criteria. We analyze the performance of our mechanism in terms of the induced Nash equilibrium. We compare the allocations at the Nash equilibrium with throughput-optimal allocations as well as with fairness-optimal allocations. Our mechanism offers a smooth trade-off between these criteria, and allows us to produce allocations that are approximately optimal with respect to both. Our mechanism is also fairly simple and admits an efficient distributed implementation.