Towards strategic bandwidth sharing in overlay multicast networks based on mechanism design theory

The selfish behavior of the users in the overlay multicast networks can lead to degradation of the performance. In this paper, we target the mechanism design for the overlay networks based on the monopoly auction economies. In our proposed auction mechanism, the bandwidth of the service offered by the origin servers can be thought of as commodity. In this auction, the sellers are either the origin servers or the peers who forward the content to their downstream peers. Also, the corresponding downstream peers of each seller play the role of buyers who are referred to as bidders. Each bidder submits a sealed bid to its corresponding seller. The high bidder wins and pays its bid for the service. By theoretical and experimental analysis, we prove that the proposed auction mechanism achieves performance improvements in the overlay network.