  By delegating path control to end-hosts, future Internet architectures offer
flexibility for path selection. However, there is a concern that the
distributed routing decisions by end-hosts, in particular load-adaptive
routing, can lead to oscillations if path selection is performed without
coordination or accurate load information. Prior research has addressed this
problem by devising path-selection policies that lead to stability. However,
little is known about the viability of these policies in the Internet context,
where selfish end-hosts can deviate from a prescribed policy if such a
deviation is beneficial fromtheir individual perspective. In order to achieve
network stability in future Internet architectures, it is essential that
end-hosts have an incentive to adopt a stability-oriented path-selection
policy. In this work, we perform the first incentive analysis of the
stability-inducing path-selection policies proposed in the literature. Building
on a game-theoretic model of end-host path selection, we show that these
policies are in fact incompatible with the self-interest of end-hosts, as these
strategies make it worthwhile to pursue an oscillatory path-selection strategy.
Therefore, stability in networks with selfish end-hosts must be enforced by
incentive-compatible mechanisms. We present two such mechanisms and formally
prove their incentive compatibility.
