An Equilibrium Policy for Providing End-to-End Service Level Agreements in Interdomain Network

In next generation networks, technological advancements lead a trend towards offering guaranteed services. ISPs are eager to support subscribers´ requirements by offering SLAs across domains. This paper considers the interaction between ISPs under deregulatory environment. In order to capture a freedom of the policy selection, path-classification scheme is proposed to group paths into a few choices which ISPs can freely select. By means of Nash equilibrium, the equilibrium policy has been found with searching algorithm by applying the modified MSA. We investigate the equilibrium based on network performance and utility functions according to business relationships, namely, peer, wholesale and retail services. The experimental results show that the equilibrium policy leads ISPs to act as non-selfish behavior under the network objective of blocking probability. Meanwhile, based on the utility functions of business models (i.e. peer, wholesale and retail services), the equilibrium policy leads ISPs to act as a selfish behavior.