Business network formation among 5G providers

Virtualization ensures that in the approaching 5G era online services will be elastic and their deployments will be fast, fulfilling the demand of end-users rapidly and to a greater extent than what is feasible today. Telcos, cloud operators, and online application providers will join forces for delivering ICT services to customers globally. In order to support the mobility of customers, or the mere geographic span of an integrated enterprise application, the service deployments must span over many administrative domains and an assured quality of collaboration among various infrastructure and service providers is necessary. Therefore the vision of the 5G ecosystem is partly founded on the federation of these stakeholders in which they can seamlessly cooperate with the goal of creating the resource slices and the services within for a maximal geographic reach of customers. In this ecosystem, business aspects will greatly influence the technical capability and performance: we argue that the cooperative network of the actors will inherently determine availability and end-user prices of certain services. In this work we model the business relations of infrastructure providers as a variant of network formation games, and we derive conditions under which the current transit-peering structure of network providers remains intact.