Introducing collaborations for multi-path selection of multiple selfish overlays

In complex Internet, different overlay flows are likely to share and compete the same congestible resources. We present a game-theoretic study of the selfish strategic collaboration of multiple overlays when they are allowed to use multipath transfer, which is referred as the multipath selection game. Then we consider the equilibrium in this multipath selection game model where selfish players distribute their overlay traffic. Maximization of the utility functions for each overlay is the criterion of optimality. We adopt the objective of throughput maximization to capture the most typical overlay behaviors, and use the usual TCP as the basis of our analysis. We show analytically the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibria in these games. Furthermore, we find that the loss of efficiency of Nash equilibria can be arbitrarily large if overlays do not have resource limitations. Our simulations confirm effectiveness and TCP-friendliness of multipath transfer for a range of path number and in the presence of multiple overlay traffic.