Braess's Paradox in large random graphs

Abstract

Braess's Paradox is the counterintuitive fact that removing edges from a network with “selfish routing” can decreasethe latency incurred by traffic in an equilibrium flow. We prove that Braess's Paradox is likely to occur in a natural random network model: with high probability, there is a traffic rate and a set of edges whose removal improves the latency of traffic in an equilibrium flow by a constant factor. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2010