A Stackelberg game-based approach for interactions among Internet service providers and content providers

Abstract

This paper studies non-neutral market share where Internet service providers (ISPs) charge content providers (CPs) for the content delivery. Each provider seeks to maximize its own profit by determining its price and their service qualities (quality of service and credibility of content). First, we utilize a Stackelberg game to study the interactions between ISPs and CPs. We formulate the interactions among multiple ISPs (multiple CPs) as a non-cooperative game. In turn, the subscribers’ demand for the service of a provider depends not only on their strategies, but also upon those proposed by all of its competitors. Then we provide some interesting results regarding the Nash equilibrium of this game. More precisely, we show existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium under some conditions. An iterative and distributed algorithm based on best response dynamics is proposed to achieve the equilibrium point; additionally, in order to quantify how efficient the Nash equilibrium point is, a detailed analysis of the Price of Anarchy is adopted to evaluate the performance of the system at equilibrium. Finally, extensive simulations show convergence of a proposed schema to the Nash equilibrium and show the effect of side payment on providers’ policies and the effect of bandwidth cost on ISPs’ policies.