A value based framework for provider selection of regional ISPs

To access to the Internet, regional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to buy transit service from global ISPs. Provider selection strategies are related closely to ISPs´ economic interests. With the growing number of potential transit provider and the flattening topology of the Internet, it´s getting harder for ISPs to select upstream provider empirically as before. In this paper, we propose a concept of bargaining power as an important decision-making criterion of ISPs during their provider selection process, and design a value based framework to help ISPs´ provider selection based on it. The bargaining power of each involved ISP is computed by applying the Shapley Value based transit value distribution mechanism to each involved traffic flow, taking into consideration the cooperative possibility among ISPs and the market roles these ISPs play, i.e., potential providers or potential competitors. It reflects not only the cost and link level transit performance, geographical constraints, but also includes the influence of interconnection impacts, demand/supply relationships by analyzing the traffic content and commercial relationships among ISPs. We then design a quantitative provider selection framework and instantiate our framework using the operation data of a real-world network, CERNET, a national ISP in China. In addition, we evaluate our provider selection results for CERNET and the experimental results show the effectiveness and practicability of our solution in this paper.