Better bounds for online load balancing on unrelated machines
Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Regret minimization and the price of total anarchy
STOC '08 Proceedings of the fortieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Nash equilibria in discrete routing games with convex latency functions
Journal of Computer and System Sciences
The Influence of Link Restrictions on (Random) Selfish Routing
SAGT '08 Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory
Efficient coordination mechanisms for unrelated machine scheduling
SODA '09 Proceedings of the twentieth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Improving the Efficiency of Load Balancing Games through Taxes
WINE '08 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
Atomic routing games on maximum congestion
Theoretical Computer Science
Mediated Equilibria in Load-Balancing Games
WINE '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
Nonadaptive selfish routing with online demands
CAAN'07 Proceedings of the 4th conference on Combinatorial and algorithmic aspects of networking
Designing a practical access point association protocol
INFOCOM'10 Proceedings of the 29th conference on Information communications
Tradeoffs and Average-Case Equilibria in Selfish Routing
ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (TOCT)
Taxes for linear atomic congestion games
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
Faster algorithms for semi-matching problems
ICALP'10 Proceedings of the 37th international colloquium conference on Automata, languages and programming
Weighted congestion games: price of anarchy, universal worst-case examples, and tightness
ESA'10 Proceedings of the 18th annual European conference on Algorithms: Part II
The impact of altruism on the efficiency of atomic congestion games
TGC'10 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Trustworthly global computing
Partition equilibrium always exists in resource selection games
SAGT'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Algorithmic game theory
Bottleneck congestion games with logarithmic price of anarchy
SAGT'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Algorithmic game theory
Social context congestion games
SIROCCO'11 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Structural information and communication complexity
WINE'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Smooth inequalities and equilibrium inefficiency in scheduling games
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Social context congestion games
Theoretical Computer Science
Hi-index | 0.00 |
We revisit a classical load balancing problem in the modern context of decentralized systems and self-interested clients. In particular, there is a set of clients, each of whom must choose a server from a permissible set. Each client has a unit-length job and selfishly wants to minimize its own latency (job completion time). A server's latency is inversely proportional to its speed, but it grows linearly with (or, more generally, as the pth power of) the number of clients matched to it. This interaction is naturally modeled as an atomic congestion game, which we call selfish load balancing. We analyze the Nash equilibria of this game and prove nearly tight bounds on the price of anarchy (worst-case ratio between a Nash solution and the social optimum). In particular, for linear latency functions, we show that if the server speeds are relatively bounded and the number of clients is large compared with the number of servers, then every Nash assignment approaches social optimum. Without any assumptions on the number of clients, servers, and server speeds, the price of anarchy is at most 2.5. If all servers have the same speed, then the price of anarchy further improves to $1 + 2/\sqrt{3} \approx 2.15.$ We also exhibit a lower bound of 2.01. Our proof techniques can also be adapted for the coordinated load balancing problem under L2 norm, where it slightly improves the best previously known upper bound on the competitive ratio of a simple greedy scheme.