A study of the providers selfish behaviors in interdomain networks based on a new model for QoS provisioning

Management of QoS in interdomain networks has become a crucial task, either for ASs providing the final services or ASs acting as transit service providers. Indeed, the fully decentralized manner in which interdomain is operated, requires a distributed algorithms for QoS management. However, when designing distributed algorithms for networks, it is usually assumed that the participants collaborate in order to collectively achieve optimal global performance. Unfortunately, this assumption does not hold in interdomain networks, particulary when it concerns the providers benefits. Generally providers tend to be selfish and always attempt to maximize their local objectives and self-interests. Game theory provides a natural framework for the study of providers interactions by considering them as a players that compete to maximize their economic revenues and minimize losses in the long run. The primary motivation of this paper is to develop a QoS game framework that encompasses key aspects of both QoS policies and network design games. We use pricing mechanisms as means to regulate the provider’s decisions and we investigate two particular strategies for prices updates. Regarding these pricing strategies, we focus on the impact of provider’s selfishness on both network efficiency and the provider’s purposes. We have simulated the proposed strategies and we have shown that under some assumptions, selfishness can have a good effect for both network and providers.