Selfish caching in distributed systems

We analyze replication of resources by server nodes that act selfishly, using a game-theoretic approach. We refer to this as the selfish caching problem. In our model, nodes incur either cost for replicating resources or cost for access to a remote replica. We show the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria and investigate the price of anarchy, which is the relative cost of the lack of coordination. The price of anarchy can be high due to undersupply problems, but with certain network topologies it has better bounds. With a payment scheme the game can always implement the social optimum in the best case by giving servers incentive to replicate.

# Game Theory and Applications # Decision Sciences # Caching and Content Delivery # Computer Science # Distributed systems and fault tolerance

Byung-Gon Chun, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Hoeteck Wee, et al. (2004). "Selfish caching in distributed systems". ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC). https://doi.org/10.1145/1011767.1011771