The Price of Anarchy of Network Coding and Routing Based on an ACS Pricing Mechanism

To emphasize the decisions of all users, and the total number of users sharing the same technique, we propose a novel Average cost sharing (ACS) pricing mechanism to study the game between Network coding (NC) and routing flows sharing a single link when users are price anticipating. We characterize the worst-case efficiency bounds of the game compared with the optimal (i.e., the Price of anarchy (PoA)), which can be as low as 4/9 when the number of routing users becomes sufficiently large. NC cannot improve the PoA significantly under ACS. However, to achieve a more efficient use of limited resources, this approach indicates the sharing users have a greater tendency to choose NC. However, the users will follow the majority users' choice of data transmission technique.