Competitive routing in multiuser communication networks
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Computers and Operations Research
Price of anarchy in non-cooperative load balancing games
Performance Evaluation
Competition in access to content
IFIP'12 Proceedings of the 11th international IFIP TC 6 conference on Networking - Volume Part II
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We study competition between local Internet Service Providiers (ISPs) over access to content in a telecom market. We assume that the local ISPs do not have direct access to content. The content that they provide to their subscribers is assumed to originate from content providers and to transit through intermediate regional ISPs. Each local ISP is assumed to have an agreement with one given regional ISP. We consider vertical monopolies where each regional ISP has an exclusive agreement with another content provider (CP) called a "super CP". As a result, we assume that a CP favors the demand it receives from its partner regional ISP over the one it receives from other ones and likewize, a regional ISP will favor traffic from its partner CP. Thus, a local ISP seeking content from a CP will receive the content at a better quality of service or at a cheaper price if the CP is the partner of its regional ISP. Through a game theoretical analysis, we show that in spite of the non neutrality in the network, the competition between the local ISPs results in diversity in accessing content, so that at equilibrium, local ISPs do not restrict their demand to the CPs that are partners of their regional ISPs. We then further study the impact of collusions between local service providers on the access to content.