Price of Anarchy with multiple information sources under competition

Abstract

We characterize the Price of Anarchy (PoA) in a single channel under the presence of K competing sources. As performance metric we consider the Age of Information, which measures the freshness of information in a remote system. In our main results we show that when the service times of all sources are equal the PoA is 2−1K, and that otherwise the PoA is unbounded from above. Numerical computations show that the PoA increases with the disparity of the service rates.