Reducing the oscillations between overlay routing and traffic engineering by repeated game theory

Due to the conflicts existing in the route objectives of overlay routing and traffic engineering, the interaction between the two selfish players may converge to an inefficient Nash equilibrium point, even if the better choice may exist. We formulate the interaction as an infinitely repeated two-player game, where overlay routing aims to minimize the average latency of overlay users and traffic engineering aims to minimize the maximum link utilization of overall network. The whole interaction process could be divided into two stages - learning stage and practice stage. The former collects the historical information and finds the best point with a simple learning algorithm, then the latter uses this point as equilibrium point and converges to it. The simulation results show that both overlay routing and traffic engineering can converge to the win-win results, and the overall network can avoid the performance volatility from endless oscillations.