Abstract
Price of anarchy is an oft-used worst-case measure of the inefficiency of noncooperative decentralized architectures. For a noncooperative load-balancing game with two classes of servers and for a finite or infinite number of dispatchers, we show that the price of anarchy is an overly pessimistic measure that does not reflect the performance obtained in most instances of the problem. We explicitly characterize the worst-case traffic conditions for the efficiency of noncooperative load-balancing schemes and show that, contrary to a common belief, the worst inefficiency is in general not achieved in heavy traffic.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Is the Price of Anarchy the Right Measure for Load-Balancing Games?
- U. Ayesta, O. Brun, and B. J. Prabhu. 2011. Price of anarchy in non-cooperative load-balancing games. Perform. Eval. 68, 1312--1332. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- C. H. Bell and S. Stidham. 1983. Individual versus social optimization in the allocation of customers to alternative servers. Manag. Sci. 29, 831--839. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- D. P. Bertsekas and J. N. Tsitsiklis. 1989. Parallel and Distributed Computation: Numerical Methods. Prentice-Hall. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- H. L. Chen, J. Marden, and A. Wierman. 2009. The effect of local scheduling in load balancing designs. ACM Perform. Eval. Rev. 36, 2, 110--112. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- G. Christodoulou and E. Koutsoupias. 2005. The price of anarchy of finite congestion games. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. Doncel, U. Ayesta, O. Brun, and B. Prabhu. 2013. On the efficiency of non-cooperative load balancing. In Proceedings of the IFIP Networking Conference. 1--9.Google Scholar
- J. Doncel, U. Ayesta, O. Brun, and B. Prabhu. 2014. Supplementary appendix: Is price of anarchy the right measure for load-balancing games? ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 14(2--3). Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Haviv and T. Roughgarden. 2007. The price of anarchy in an exponential multi-server. Oper. Res. Lett. 35, 421--426. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Y. A. Korilis, A. A. Lazar, and A. Orda. 2006. Architecting noncooperative networks. IEEE J. Select. Areas Comm. 13, 7, 1241--1251. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Y. A. Korilis, A. A. Lazar, and A. Orda. 1997. Achieving network optima using stackelberg routing strategies. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 5, 1. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- E. Koutsoupias and C. H. Papadimitriou. 1999. Worst-case equilibria. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS'99). 404--413. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- R. Miller. 2009a. Google unveils its container data center. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/01/google-unveils-its-container-data-center/.Google Scholar
- R. Miller. 2009b. Who has the most web servers? http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-got-the-most-web-servers/.Google Scholar
- D. Monderer and L. S. Shapley. 1996. Potential games. Games Econ. Behav. 14, 124--143.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- D. Mosk-Aoyama, T. Roughgarden, and D. Shah. 2010. Fully distributed algorithms for convex optimization problems. SIAM J. Optim. 20, 6, 3260--3279. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Roughgarden. 2005. Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy. MIT Press. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Roughgarden. 2009. Intrinsic robustness of the price of anarchy. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- S. Suri, C. D. Toth, and Y. Zhou. 2004. Selfish load balancing and atomic congestion games. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. G. Wardrop. 1952. Some theoretical aspects of road traffic research. Proc. Instit. Civil Engin. 1, 325--378.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
Index Terms
Is the Price of Anarchy the Right Measure for Load-Balancing Games?
Recommendations
Price of anarchy in non-cooperative load balancing games
We investigate the price of anarchy of a load balancing game with K dispatchers. The service rates and holding costs are assumed to depend on the server, and the service discipline is assumed to be processor-sharing at each server. The performance ...
Pure and Bayes-Nash Price of Anarchy for Generalized Second Price Auction
FOCS '10: Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 51st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer ScienceThe Generalized Second Price Auction has been the main mechanism used by search companies to auction positions for advertisements on search pages. In this paper we study the social welfare of the Nash equilibria of this game in various models. In the ...
Strong price of anarchy for machine load balancing
ICALP'07: Proceedings of the 34th international conference on Automata, Languages and ProgrammingAs defined by Aumann in 1959, a strong equilibrium is a Nash equilibrium that is resilient to deviations by coalitions. We give tight bounds on the strong price of anarchy for load balancing on related machines. We also give tight bounds for k-strong ...






Comments