Can P2P Technology Benefit Eyeball ISPs? A Cooperative Profit Distribution Answer

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been regarded as a promising way to help Content Providers (CPs) cost-effectively distribute content. However, under the traditional Internet pricing mechanism, the fact that most P2P traffic flows among peers can dramatically decrease the profit of ISPs, who may take actions against P2P and impede the progress of P2P technology. In this paper, we develop a mathematical framework to analyze such economic issues. Inspired by the idea from cooperative game theory, we propose a cooperative profit-distribution model based on Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), in which eyeball ISPs and Peer-assisted CPs (PCPs) form two coalitions respectively and then compute a fair Pareto point to determine profit distribution. Moreover, we design a fair and feasible mechanism for profit distribution within each coalition. We show that such a cooperative method not only guarantees the fair profit distribution among network participators, but also helps to improve the economic efficiency of the overall network system. To our knowledge, this is the first work that systematically studies solutions for P2P caused unbalanced profit distribution and gives a feasible cooperative method to increase and fairly share profit

ISP Uplink Pricing in a Competitive Market

Abstract—In recent years, the upgrade of access networks to broadband networks together with the P2P technology has brought many new applications to the Internet. P2P applications have quickly become the biggest consumer of network resources. ISPs of access networks as well as backbone networks are all wondering how to better manage their network resources. We explore the idea of uplink pricing as a way to provide differential pricing to P2P and regular users. In particular, we formulate a simple economic model to analyze under what scenarios uplink pricing will be adopted by all ISPs in a competitive market. Index Terms—ISP, P2P traffic management, network economics I