A Game Theory Perspective on IP Routing Protocols Evaluation

A non-cooperative game model is established in this paper for equilibrium analysis on common IP routing protocols, i.e., RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, and EIGRP, and the possible causes of non-equilibrium are demonstrated, such as the existence of the same link in the selected paths, and all the packets tending to avoid the link with a high delay. To improve routing, a method of decreasing the variance of routing basis between different links is proposed. Experimental results show that this method reduces the proportion of packets with non-minimized costs by 20% on average, and reduces the average actual cost per packet by 36%.