On Braess's paradox and routing algorithms

Abstract

In road traffic networks, famous Braess's Paradox demonstrated that the addition of resources can cause the traffic network performance to decrease. The addition of a new route can cause drivers to use this new road and end up reaching a Nash equilibrium which increases the overall travel time. Unlike previous studies that have investigated the paradox in the context of game theory, road traffic network, and latency edge data network, in this paper we show the novel issue of how the addition of resources can lead to a decrease in data network performance while using certain routing algorithm (ie, shortest widest path—used for quality‐of‐service routing, quickest path, geographic routing, quality‐of‐service energy‐aware routing), without even considering congestion. We demonstrate the idea for any network size and describe the fundamental issue. Finally, we describe solutions based on current network's technology.