2,134 research outputs found
Designing Network Protocols for Good Equilibria
Designing and deploying a network protocol determines the rules by which end users interact with each other and with the network. We consider the problem of designing a protocol to optimize the equilibrium behavior of a network with selfish users. We consider network cost-sharing games, where the set of Nash equilibria depends fundamentally on the choice of an edge cost-sharing protocol. Previous research focused on the Shapley protocol, in which the cost of each edge is shared equally among its users. We systematically study the design of optimal cost-sharing protocols for undirected and directed graphs, single-sink and multicommodity networks, and different measures of the inefficiency of equilibria. Our primary technical tool is a precise characterization of the cost-sharing protocols that induce only network games with pure-strategy Nash equilibria. We use this characterization to prove, among other results, that the Shapley protocol is optimal in directed graphs and that simple priority protocols are essentially optimal in undirected graphs
On Temporal Graph Exploration
A temporal graph is a graph in which the edge set can change from step to
step. The temporal graph exploration problem TEXP is the problem of computing a
foremost exploration schedule for a temporal graph, i.e., a temporal walk that
starts at a given start node, visits all nodes of the graph, and has the
smallest arrival time. In the first part of the paper, we consider only
temporal graphs that are connected at each step. For such temporal graphs with
nodes, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate TEXP with ratio
for any . We also provide an explicit
construction of temporal graphs that require steps to be
explored. We then consider TEXP under the assumption that the underlying graph
(i.e. the graph that contains all edges that are present in the temporal graph
in at least one step) belongs to a specific class of graphs. Among other
results, we show that temporal graphs can be explored in steps if the underlying graph has treewidth and in
steps if the underlying graph is a grid. In the second part of the
paper, we replace the connectedness assumption by a weaker assumption and show
that -edge temporal graphs with regularly present edges and with random
edges can always be explored in steps and steps with high
probability, respectively. We finally show that the latter result can be used
to obtain a distributed algorithm for the gossiping problem.Comment: This is an extended version of an ICALP 2015 pape
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