Consider a communication network to which a sequence of self-interested users come and send requests for data transmission between nodes. This work studies the question of how to guide the path selection choices made by those online-arriving users and maximize the social welfare. Competitive analysis is the main technical tool. Specifically, the impacts of path length bounds and topology on the competitive ratio of the designed algorithm are analyzed theoretically and explored experimentally. We observe intricate and interesting relationships between the empirical performance and the studied network parameters, which shed some light on how to design the network. We also investigate the influence of system-level costs on the optimal algorithm design.

翻译：考虑一个通信网络，其中一系列自利用户依次到达并在节点间发送数据传输请求。本研究探讨如何引导这些在线到达用户的路径选择决策，以最大化社会福利。竞争性分析是主要技术工具。具体而言，本文从理论上分析并实验探究了路径长度限制与网络拓扑对设计算法竞争比的影响。我们观察到经验性能与所研究的网络参数之间存在复杂而有趣的关系，这为网络设计提供了一定启示。同时，我们还研究了系统级成本对最优算法设计的影响。