Peering and Provisioning of Differentiated Internet Services

A key consideration in building differentiated network services is the feasibility of maintaining stable and consistent service level agreements across multiple networks where allocations are made only on the edges. To investigate this, we consider a game theoretic model of capacity provisioning in a differentiated services internet. The players are one raw-capacity seller per network, one broker per service per network, and users, to play the roles of whole-sellers, retailers and end-users respectively in a twotier whole-seller/retailer market. Based on this model, we are able to construct an explicit necessary and sufficient condition for the stability of the game, which determines the sustainability of a given set of SLA configurations among peering ISPs. The analytical results are validated with simulations of user and broker dynamics, using distributed progressive second price auctions as the spot market mechanism in a scenario with three inter-connected networks, and two services. Keywords—differentiated service, capacity provision, second price auction, peering stability