We characterize the Price of Anarchy (PoA) in a single channel under the presence of K competing sources. As performance metric we consider the Age of Information, which measures the freshness of information in a remote system. In our main results we show that when the service times of all sources are equal the PoA is $2-\frac{1}{K}$, and that otherwise the PoA is unbounded from above. Numerical computations show that the PoA increases with the disparity of the service rates.

中文翻译：

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竞争下多信息源无政府状态的代价

我们在存在K 个竞争源的情况下描述了单一渠道中的无政府主义价格 (PoA) 。作为性能指标，我们考虑信息时代，它衡量远程系统中信息的新鲜度。在我们的主要结果中，我们表明，当所有源的服务时间相等时，PoA 为$2-\frac{1}{K}$，否则 PoA 不受上面限制。数值计算表明，PoA随着服务费率差异的增加而增加。