Abstract
Imagine a set of self-interested clients, each of whom must choose a server from a permissible set. A server’s latency is inversely proportional to its speed, but it grows linearly with (or, more generally, as the pth power of) the number of clients matched to it. Many emerging Internet-centric applications such as peer-to-peer networks, multi-player online games and distributed computing platforms exhibit such interaction of self-interested users. This interaction is naturally modeled as a congestion game, which we call server matching. In this overview paper, we summarize results of our ongoing work on the analysis of the server matching game, and suggest some promising directions for future research.
Research by the first three authors was partially supported by National Science Foundation grants CCR-0049093 and IIS-0121562.
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Kothari, A., Suri, S., Tóth, C.D., Zhou, Y. (2005). Congestion Games, Load Balancing, and Price of Anarchy. In: López-Ortiz, A., Hamel, A.M. (eds) Combinatorial and Algorithmic Aspects of Networking. CAAN 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3405. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11527954_3
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