Bandwidth allocation and pricing for SDN-enabled home networks

In this paper, we propose to combine the emerging software defined networking (SDN) paradigm with the existing residential broadband infrastructure to enable home users to have dynamic control over their traffic flows. The SDN centralized control technology enables household devices to have virtualized services with quality of service (QoS) guarantee. SDN-enabled open application programming interfaces (APIs) allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to perform bandwidth slicing in home networks and implement time-dependent hybrid pricing. Given the requests from household devices for virtualized and non-virtualized services, we formulate a Stackelberg game to characterize the pricing strategy of ISP as well as bandwidth allocation strategy in home networks. In the Stackelberg game, the leader is the ISP and the followers are the home networks. We determine the optimal strategies which provide maximal payoff for the ISP. Numerical results show that our proposed SDN-enabled home network technology with the hybrid pricing scheme provides a better performance than a usage-based pricing scheme tailored for best-effort home networks.