End-to-end QoS negotiation in network federations

The Future Internet will see the emergence of value-added applications (e.g. telepresence, etc.) requiring Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees across multiple managed networks. Deploying mechanisms to solve technical questions entails a minimal cooperation between network operators (aka. carriers). But, this cooperation is subject to economic constraints (e.g. confidentiality on resources, pricing, risk avoidance, etc.). To overcome them, an interesting direction lies in the creation of operator federations, aka. alliances, that would ensure a technical convergence. In this paper, we detail the work in progress on a scenario of inter-carrier service negotiation taking place within such a federation. The service is negotiated between a third party responsible for the federation and customers. We describe the associated game and analyze equilibrium conditions in it.