A novel game-theoretic framework for modeling interactions of ISPs anticipating users' reactions

Effective management of overlay traffic is crucial for ISPs, due to the high interconnection costs incurred. In this paper, we investigate the interactions among ISPs that manage effectively overlay traffic but also take into account users' reactions. We introduce an innovative game-theoretic framework that employs separately two metrics, quantifying the ISPs' interconnection costs and the effects of their actions to users' QoE with the permissible strategies at each state being “memory-based”, i.e., depending on the payoffs of the previous states. We present the details of this framework and justify why it fits nicely our problem. Furthermore, we study two games that model the adoption of ISP-driven locality promotion and of ISP-owned caches that intervene in the overlay. We formulate these games and investigate their evolution and equilibria by means of two theoretical models, one of which is introduced here for quantifying the effects of promoting locality, and simulations.