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

  • Authors:

  • Richard T. B. Ma;Dah Ming Chiu;John C. S. Lui;Vishal Misra;Dan Rubenstein

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore and Advanced Digital Sciences Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL;Department of Information Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY;Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY

  • Venue:
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

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 profit 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 values under more diverse Internet topologies. We also identify the implications on the bilateral compensation between ISPs and the pricing structures for differentiated services. In practice, these results provide guidelines for solving disputes between ISPs and for establishing regulatory protocols for differentiated services and the industry.