On cooperative settlement between content, transit and eyeball internet service providers

Internet service providers (ISPs) depend on one another to provide global network services. However, the profit-seeking nature of the ISPs leads to selfish behaviors that result in inefficiencies and disputes in the network. This concern is at the heart of the "network neutrality" debate, which also asks for an appropriate compensation structure that satisfies all types of ISPs. Our previous work showed in a general network model that the Shapley value has several desirable properties, and that if applied as the revenue model, selfish ISPs would yield globally optimal routing and interconnecting decisions. In this paper, we use a more detailed and realistic network model with three classes of ISPs: content, transit, and eyeball. This additional detail enables us to delve much deeper into the implications of a Shapley settlement mechanism. We derive closed-form Shapley values for more structured ISP topologies and develop a dynamic programming procedure to compute the Shapley...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Richard T. B. Ma, Dah-Ming Chiu, John C. S. Lui, Vishal Misra, Dan Rubenstein
• Keywords: Computer Networks, CONEXT 2008, ISPs, Network Model, Shapley Values