Designing Virus-Resistant, High-Performance Networks: A Game-Formation Approach

Designing an optimal network topology while balancing multiple, possibly conflicting objectives such as cost, performance, and resiliency to viruses is a challenging endeavor, let alone in the case of decentralized network formation. We, therefore, propose a game-formation technique where each player aims to minimize its cost in installing links, the probability of being infected by a virus, and the sum of hopcounts on its shortest paths to all other nodes. In this paper, we first determine the Nash equilibria and the price of anarchy (PoA) for our novel network formation game, second demonstrate that the PoA is usually low, which suggests that (near-) optimal topologies can be formed in a decentralized way, and third give suggestions for practitioners for those cases where the PoA is high and some centralized control/incentives are advisable.