ITR: Game Theoretic Approaches to the Internet Problems

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The emerging area of algorithmic game theory carries much promise because of new game theoretic issues arising from the Internet and because of the opportunity of applying recently developed powerful ideas from the yield of approximation algorithms to these issues. BGP is an important network protocol whose performance affects many applications, and in fact is critical to the integrity of the network. It is also one of the rare cases for which some routing data is available. We propose to study BGP routing stability from a game theoretic perspective. Our work will span all the way from mathematical modeling to a concrete proposal for developing network performance evaluation primitives. Our project is interdisciplinary. Our team, together with our collaborators in the networking community, combine excellent complementary expertise and has successfully carried out a theory/networking project in the past. The impact of this work lies both in developing mathematical techniques and opening a new channel in technology transfer. We report several preliminary results. We also touch on other computational game theoretic issues such as cost sharing and protmaximizing pricing.