Congestion load balancing game with losses

Abstract

We study the symmetric version of the load balancing game introduced by H. Kameda. We consider a non-splittable atomic game with lossy links. Thus costs are not additive and flow is not conserved (total flow entering a link is greater than the flow leaving it). We show that there is no unique equilibrium in the game. We identify several symmetric equilibria and show how the number of equilibria depends on the problem's parameters. We compute the globally optimal solution and compare its performance to the equilibrium. We finally identify the Kameda paradox which was introduced initially in networks without losses.