Designing virus-resistant, high-performance networks: a game-formation approach

Stojan Trajanovski (1) , Fernando A Kuipers (2) , Yezekael Hayel (3) , Eitan Altman (4, 3, 5, 6) , Piet Van Mieghem (2)

1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science [Delft]
2 NAS GROUP - Network Architectures and Services Group
3 LIA - Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon
4 COMUE UCA - COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019)
5 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences
6 NEO - Network Engineering and Operations

Designing an optimal network topology while balancing multiple, possibly conflicting objectives like cost, performance, and resiliency to viruses is a challenging endeavor, let alone in the case of decentralized network formation. We therefore propose a game-formation technique where each player aims to minimize its cost in installing links, the probability of being infected by a virus and the sum of hopcounts on its shortest paths to all other nodes. In this article, we (1) determine the Nash Equilibria and the Price of Anarchy for our novel network formation game, (2) demonstrate that the Price of Anarchy (PoA) is usually low, which suggests that (near-)optimal topologies can be formed in a decentralized way, and (3) give suggestions for practitioners for those cases where the PoA is high and some centralized control/incentives are advisable.

Mots clés: Game theory; Virus spread; Network performance; Network design; Networks of Autonomous Agents

Domaines: Informatique et théorie des jeux [cs.GT]

Stojan Trajanovski, Fernando A Kuipers, Yezekael Hayel, Eitan Altman, Piet Van Mieghem. Designing virus-resistant, high-performance networks: a game-formation approach. IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2017. ⟨hal-01575073⟩