Abstract
By delegating path control to end-hosts, future Internet architectures offer flexibility for path selection. However, a concern arises that the distributed routing decisions by endhosts, in particular load-adaptive routing, can lead to oscillations if path selection is performed without coordination or accurate load information. Prior research has addressed this problem by devising local path-selection policies that lead to global stability. However, little is known about the viability of these policies in the Internet context, where selfish end-hosts can deviate from a prescribed policy if such a deviation is beneficial from their individual perspective. In order to achieve network stability in future Internet architectures, it is essential that end-hosts have an incentive to adopt a stability-oriented path-selection policy. In this work, we perform the first incentive analysis of the stability-inducing path-selection policies proposed in the literature. Building on a game-theoretic model of end-host path selection, we show that these policies are in fact incompatible with the self-interest of end-hosts, as these strategies make it worthwhile to pursue an oscillatory path-selection strategy. Therefore, stability in networks with selfish endhosts must be enforced by incentive-compatible mechanisms. We present two such mechanisms and formally prove their incentive compatibility.
Highlights
The past 20 years of research on next-generation Internet architectures have shown the benefits of path awareness and path control for end-hosts, and multiple path-aware network architectures have been proposed
There is a need for mechanisms that allow network operators to incentivize the adoption of path-selection strategies that induce stability at equal load, i.e., incentive-compatible stabilization mechanisms
We have set up a game-theoretic framework that allows to test path-selection strategies on their viability for selfish end-hosts, i.e., to show whether it is rational for an end-host to adopt a path-selection strategy, given that all other end-hosts use said path-selection strategy
Summary
The past 20 years of research on next-generation Internet architectures have shown the benefits of path awareness and path control for end-hosts, and multiple path-aware network architectures have been proposed. According to the IETF, a central obstacle to deployment of path-aware network architectures is ‘oscillations based on feedback loops, as hosts move from path to path’ [7] Such oscillations can be shown to occur if path-selection decisions are taken on the basis of outdated load information [8,9], which is the case in any real system. From the end-host perspective, oscillation causes packet loss and forces the congestion-control algorithms to recurring restarts, negatively affecting throughput To avoid these damaging effects, researchers have devised numerous schemes that aim to guarantee stability of loadadaptive routing. By performing a game-theoretic analysis, we show in this paper that the non-oscillatory path-selection strategies traditionally proposed in the literature on stable source routing [8,14,15,16,17,18] are incompatible with the self-interest of endhosts. To complement our mainly theoretical work, we discuss how our findings could be practically applied
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