Selfish Routing and Path Coloring in All-Optical Networks

We study routing and path coloring problems in all-optical networks as non-cooperative games. We especially focus on oblivious payment functions, that is, functions that charge a player according to her own strategy only. We first strengthen a known relation between such games and online routing and path coloring. In particular, we show that the price of anarchy of such games is lower-bounded by, and in several cases precisely equal to, the competitive ratio of appropriate modifications of the First Fit algorithm. Based on this framework we provide results for two classes of games in ring networks: in Selfish Routing and Path Coloring a player must determine both a routing and a coloring for her request, while in Selfish Path Coloring the routing is predetermined and only a coloring of requests needs to be specified. We prove specific upper and lower bounds on the price of anarchy of these games under various payment functions.