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Equilibria for networks with malicious users

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Abstract

We consider the problem of characterizing user equilibria and optimal solutions for selfish routing in a given network. We extend the known models by considering malicious behavior. While selfish users follow a strategy that minimizes their individual cost, a malicious user will use his flow through the network in an effort to cause the maximum possible damage to the overall cost. We define a generalized model, present characterizations of flows at equilibrium and prove bounds for the ratio of the social cost of a flow at equilibrium over the cost when centralized coordination among users is allowed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. West, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4K1, Canada

    George Karakostas

  2. School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, Madsen Building F09, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Anastasios Viglas

Authors
  1. George Karakostas
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  2. Anastasios Viglas
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Correspondence to Anastasios Viglas.

Additional information

An extended abstract of this work appeared in the Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC) 2003.

G. Karakostas’ research was supported by an NSERC Discovery research grant and MITACS.

Part of this research was done when Viglas was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada.

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Karakostas, G., Viglas, A. Equilibria for networks with malicious users. Math. Program. 110, 591–613 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-006-0015-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-006-0015-2

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