CAPACITY ALLOCATION UNDER NONCOOPERATIVE ROUTING

The capacity allocation problem in a network that is to be shared by n oncooperative users is considered, Each user decides independently upo n its routing strategy so as to optimize its individual performance ob jective, The operating points of the network are the Nash equilibria o f the underlying routing game, The network designer aims to allocate l ink capacities, so that the resulting Nash equilibria are efficient, a ccording to some systemwide performance criterion, In general, the sol ution of such design problems is complex and at times counterintuitive , since adding link capacity might lead to degradation of user perform ance, For systems of parallel links, we show that such paradoxes do no t occur and that the capacity allocation problem has a simple and intu itive optimal solution that coincides with the solution in the single- user case.