A stackelberg game based analysis for interactions among Internet service provider, content provider, and advertisers

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed a huge acceleration in global Internet traffic. Users' demand for contents is also rising accordingly. Therefore, content providers (CPs) that provide contents for users get high revenue from the traffic growth. There are generally two ways for CPs to get revenue: (i) charge users for the contents they view or download; (ii) get revenue from advertisers. On the other hand, Internet service providers (ISPs) are investing in network infrastructure to provide better quality of service (QoS), but they do not benefit directly from the content traffic. One option for ISPs to compensate their investment cost is sharing CPs' revenue by side payment from CPs to ISPs. Then ISPs will be motivated to keep on investing in developing new network technology and enlarging the capacity to improve QoS. However, it is important to evaluate how each player is affected by this kind of side payment. Our previous work has studied this problem by assuming that CPs charged users for the contents they view or download, in this paper it is considered that CP does not directly charge end users, but charges advertisers for revenue. Stackelberg game is utilized to study the interactions among ISP, CP, end users and advertisers. A unique Nash equilibrium is established and numerical analysis has validated our theoretic results. It shows that side payment from CP to ISP impairs the CP's investment of contents, and ISP can benefit from charging CP, while CP's payoff is impaired.