Congestion Game with Agent and Resource Failures

Motivated by practical scenarios, we study congestion games with failures. We investigate two models. The first model is congestion games with both resource and agent failures, where each agent chooses the same number of resources with the minimum expected cost. We prove that the game is potential and hence admits at least one pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (pure-NE). We also show that the Price of Anarchy and the Price of Stability are bounded (equal to 1 in some cases). The second model is congestion games with only resource failures (CG-CRF), where resources are provided in packages, and their failures can be correlated with each other. Each agent can choose multiple packages for reliability's sake and utilize the survived one having the minimum cost. CG-CRF is shown to be not potential. We prove that it admits at least one pure-NE by constructing one efficiently. Finally, we discuss various applications of these two games in the networking field. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper studying congestion games with the coexistence of resource and agent failures, and we give also the first proof of the existence of a pure-NE in congestion games with correlated package failures. © 1983-2012 IEEE.