A game theory approach to cooperative and non-cooperative routing problems

Previous work on multiobjective routing takes a system optimization approach to minimize some global objective function. An approach using a game-theoretic formulation is taken. The authors focus on a simple example of two classes which minimize a delay objective. Three cases are considered. The first case (baseline) does global optimization where the routing policies for the two classes are forced to be equal. The second case is where the two classes cooperate to minimize the same objective function of global average delay. In general, this team optimization approach will have a multiplicity of solutions which make it possible to use secondary objectives to select the operating point. The third case is where each class optimizes its own objective function, which corresponds to the classical noncooperative Nash game. This allows different objectives to be adopted by the different classes.<>