A Game Theory Framework for ISP Streaming Traffic Management

The overlay/underlay topology mismatch affects the performance of existing P2P platforms that can generate large volumes of unnecessary inter-ISP network traffic. Although recent works have shown the benefits of network awareness P2P solutions, no studies have focused on the investigation of the ISP behavior and their cooperative/non-cooperative attitudes. This paper proposes a game theoretic framework to help the design of techniques promoting the ISP cooperation in P2P streaming platforms and decreasing unnecessary inter-domain streaming traffic. We first analyze some simple scenarios to discuss the existence of Nash equilibria, the Pareto optimality, and a fairness criterion to refine the equilibrium points. Moreover, we apply ideas from Evolutionary Game Theory to design a distributed schemata that the ISPs can use to reach “socially acceptable” equilibrium points in a large ISP population. Furthermore, we develop a discrete event simulation to evaluate the effectiveness of the Evolutionary Game Theory framework. The study presented in the paper shows that the proposed strategies can effectively stimulate ISP cooperation aiming at the minimization of inter-ISP traffic and help to provide reliable P2P streaming service.