Cooperative Inter-ISP Traffic Control Scheme Based on Bargaining Game Approach

New applications in 5G networks are becoming very popular, and internet service providers (ISPs) may take the opportunity to provide various services to their clients. Today, one of the challenging problems facing ISPs is how the profitability can be increased while maintaining an excellent network performance. In this work, we seek to understand the fundamental issues on interactions among ISPs, and design a novel inter-ISP traffic control scheme to take full advantage of network resource sharing. Our approach explores the impact of ISP peering relationship and bandwidth allocation to maximize the total system revenue. Specifically, we identify the special properties of ISPs' interactions, and employ the concept of Yu bargaining solutions to address the ISP traffic control problem. This bargaining approach minimizes the Euclidean distance between the ISP's utopia payoff and the feasible solution set to provide a fair-efficient solution. The main novelty of our proposed scheme adaptively handling contradictory requirements while maximizing the network performance. To verify the benefits of our idea, we show the correctness of our scheme through carrying out extensive simulation experiments. Finally, several research challenges are discussed and open issues are also outlined.