TY - JOUR
T1 - Traffic scheduling and revenue distribution among providers in the internet
T2 - Tradeoffs and impacts
AU - Lee, Hyojung
AU - Jang, Hyeryung
AU - Cho, Jeong Woo
AU - Yi, Yung
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 1983-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2017/2
Y1 - 2017/2
N2 - The Internet consists of economically selfish players in terms of access/transit connection and content distribution. Such selfish behaviors often lead to techno-economic inefficiencies, such as unstable peering and revenue imbalance. Recent research results suggest that cooperation-based fair revenue sharing, i.e., multi-level Internet service provider (ISP) settlements, can be a candidate solution to avoid unfair revenue share. However, it has been under-explored whether selfish ISPs actually cooperate or not (often referred to as the stability of coalition), because they may partially cooperate or even do not cooperate, depending on how much revenue is distributed to each individual ISP. In this paper, we study this stability of coalition in the Internet, where our aim is to investigate the conditions under which ISPs cooperate under different regimes on the traffic demand and network bandwidth. We first consider the under-demanded regime, i.e., network bandwidth exceeds traffic demand, where revenue sharing based on Shapley value leads ISPs to entirely cooperate, i.e., stability of the grand coalition. Next, we consider the over-demanded regime, i.e., traffic demand exceeds network bandwidth, where there may exist some ISPs who deviate from the grand coalition. In particular, this deviation depends on how users' traffic is handled inside the network, for which we consider three traffic scheduling policies having various degrees of content-value preference. We analytically compare those three scheduling policies in terms of network neutrality, and stability of cooperation that provides useful implications on when and how multi-level ISP settlements help and how the Internet should be operated for stable peering and revenue balance among ISPs.
AB - The Internet consists of economically selfish players in terms of access/transit connection and content distribution. Such selfish behaviors often lead to techno-economic inefficiencies, such as unstable peering and revenue imbalance. Recent research results suggest that cooperation-based fair revenue sharing, i.e., multi-level Internet service provider (ISP) settlements, can be a candidate solution to avoid unfair revenue share. However, it has been under-explored whether selfish ISPs actually cooperate or not (often referred to as the stability of coalition), because they may partially cooperate or even do not cooperate, depending on how much revenue is distributed to each individual ISP. In this paper, we study this stability of coalition in the Internet, where our aim is to investigate the conditions under which ISPs cooperate under different regimes on the traffic demand and network bandwidth. We first consider the under-demanded regime, i.e., network bandwidth exceeds traffic demand, where revenue sharing based on Shapley value leads ISPs to entirely cooperate, i.e., stability of the grand coalition. Next, we consider the over-demanded regime, i.e., traffic demand exceeds network bandwidth, where there may exist some ISPs who deviate from the grand coalition. In particular, this deviation depends on how users' traffic is handled inside the network, for which we consider three traffic scheduling policies having various degrees of content-value preference. We analytically compare those three scheduling policies in terms of network neutrality, and stability of cooperation that provides useful implications on when and how multi-level ISP settlements help and how the Internet should be operated for stable peering and revenue balance among ISPs.
KW - coalitional game theory
KW - Network economics
KW - Shapley value
KW - stability
KW - traffic scheduling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85017306620&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/JSAC.2017.2659378
DO - 10.1109/JSAC.2017.2659378
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85017306620
SN - 0733-8716
VL - 35
SP - 421
EP - 431
JO - IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
JF - IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IS - 2
M1 - 7835134
ER -