Stability vs. optimality in selfish ring routing

We study asymmetric atomic selfish routing in ring networks, which has diverse practical applications in network design and analysis. We are concerned with minimizing the maximum latency of source-destination node-pairs over links with linear latencies. We show that there exists an optimal solution that is a 9-approximate Nash equilibrium, significantly improving the existing upper bound of 54 on the instability factor. We present fast implementation of the best response dynamics for computing a Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we perform empirical study on the price of stability, narrowing the gap between the lower and upper bounds to 0.7436.