Designing virus-resistant, high-performance networks: a game-formation approach
For network designers and practitioners, this work provides a decentralized method to achieve near-optimal network topologies with virus resistance, though the approach is incremental.
The paper proposes a game-formation approach for designing decentralized networks that balance cost, performance, and virus resiliency. It finds that the Price of Anarchy is usually low, indicating near-optimal topologies can be formed without centralized control.
Designing an optimal network topology while balancing multiple, possibly conflicting objectives like cost, performance, and resiliency to viruses is a challenging endeavor, let alone in the case of decentralized network formation. We therefore propose a game-formation technique where each player aims to minimize its cost in installing links, the probability of being infected by a virus and the sum of hopcounts on its shortest paths to all other nodes. In this article, we (1) determine the Nash Equilibria and the Price of Anarchy for our novel network formation game, (2) demonstrate that the Price of Anarchy (PoA) is usually low, which suggests that (near-)optimal topologies can be formed in a decentralized way, and (3) give suggestions for practitioners for those cases where the PoA is high and some centralized control/incentives are advisable.