Side-payment profitability and interacting eyeball ISPs under convex demand-response modeling congestion-sensitive applications

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the profitability of side payments between content providers and ISPs in a non-neutral internet, considering various demand models, congestion effects, and competition among eyeball ISPs with caching strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized noncooperative game model incorporating convex demand response and multiple ISP competition scenarios, extending prior analyses of ISP-CP interactions.

Findings

Side payments can be profitable under certain demand sensitivities.

Convex demand models reveal congestion effects on profitability.

Competition among ISPs influences pricing and caching strategies.

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the issue of side payments between content providers (CPs) and Internet service (access bandwidth) providers (ISPs) in an Internet that is potentially not neutral. We herein generalize past results modeling the ISP and CP interaction as a noncooperative game in two directions. We consider different demand response models (price sensitivities) for different provider types in order to explore when side payments are profitable to the ISP. Also, we consider convex (non-linear) demand response to model demand triggered by traffic which is sensitive to access bandwidth congestion, particularly delay-sensitive interactive real-time applications. Finally, we consider a model with two competing "eyeball" ISPs with transit pricing of net traffic at their peering point to study the effects of caching remote content.