A BGP-based mechanism for lowest-cost routing

The routing of traffic between Internet domains or Autonomous Systems (ASs), a task known as interdomain routing, is currently handled by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). In this paper, we address the problem of interdomain routing from a mechanism-design point of view. The application of mechanism-design principles to the study of routing is the subject of earlier work by Nisan and Ronen [14] and Hershberger and Suri [10]. In this paper, we formulate and solve a version of the routing-mechanism design problem that is different from the previously studied version in three ways that make it more accurately reflective of real-world interdomain routing: (1) we treat the nodes as strategic agents, rather than the links; (2) our mechanism computes lowest-cost routes for all source-destination pairs and payments for transit nodes on all of the routes (rather than computing routes and payments for only one source-destination pair at a time, as is done in [14, 10]); (3) we show how to compute our mechanism with a distributed algorithm that is a straightforward extension to BGP and causes only modest increases in routing-table size and convergence time (in contrast with the centralized algorithms used in [14, 10]). This approach of using an existing protocol as a substrate for distributed computation may prove useful in future development of Internet algorithms generally, not only for routing or pricing problems. Our design and analysis of a strategyproof, BGP-based routing mechanism provides a new, promising direction in distributed algorithmic mechanism design, which has heretofore been focused mainly on multicast cost sharing.

[1]  Tuomas Sandholm,et al.  Distributed rational decision making , 1999 .

[2]  Gordon T. Wilfong,et al.  An analysis of BGP convergence properties , 1999, SIGCOMM '99.

[3]  Ramesh Govindan,et al.  Internet path inflation due to policy routing , 2001, SPIE ITCom.

[4]  Noam Nisan,et al.  Algorithmic Mechanism Design , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[5]  Joan Feigenbaum,et al.  Mechanism design for policy routing , 2004, PODC.

[6]  Éva Tardos,et al.  Frugal path mechanisms , 2002, SODA '02.

[7]  Jerry R. Green,et al.  Incentives in public decision-making , 1979 .

[8]  Tim Roughgarden,et al.  How bad is selfish routing? , 2002, JACM.

[9]  David C. Parkes,et al.  Using redundancy to improve robustness of distributed mechanism implementations , 2003, EC '03.

[10]  E. H. Clarke.  Multipart pricing of public goods , 1971 .

[11]  Amos Fiat,et al.  Competitive generalized auctions , 2002, STOC '02.

[12]  David C. Parkes,et al.  Iterative Combinatorial Auctions: Theory and Practice , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[13]  Michael P. Wellman.  A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems , 1993, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[14]  Theodore Groves,et al.  Incentives in Teams , 1973 .

[15]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Auction Protocols for Decentralized Scheduling , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[16]  Joan Feigenbaum,et al.  Hardness Results for Multicast Cost Sharing , 2002, FSTTCS.

[17]  Joan Feigenbaum,et al.  Sharing the Cost of Multicast Transmissions , 2001, J. Comput. Syst. Sci..

[18]  Moshe Tennenholtz,et al.  Distributed Games: From Mechanisms to Protocols , 1999, AAAI/IAAI.

[19]  David C. Parkes,et al.  iBundle: an efficient ascending price bundle auction , 1999, EC '99.

[20]  William Vickrey,et al.  Counterspeculation, Auctions, And Competitive Sealed Tenders , 1961 .

[21]  Subhash Suri,et al.  Vickrey prices and shortest paths: what is an edge worth? , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing.