Conflicts in Overlay Environments: Inefficient Equilibrium and Incentive Mechanism

Overlay networks have been widely deployed upon the Internet by Service Providers (SPs) to provide improved network services. However, the interaction between each overlay and traffic engineering (TE) as well as the interaction among co-existing overlays may occur. In this paper, we adopt both non-cooperative and cooperative game theory to analyze these interactions, which are collectively called hybrid interaction. Firstly, we model a situation of the hybrid interaction as an n+1-player non-cooperative game, in which overlays and TE are of equal status, and prove the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) for this game. Secondly, we model another situation of the hybrid interaction as a 1-leader-n-follower Stackelberg-Nash game, in which TE is the leader and co-existing overlays are followers, and prove that the cost at Stackelberg-Nash equilibrium (SNE) is at least as good as that at NE for TE. Thirdly, we propose a cooperative coalition mechanism based on Shapley value to overcome the inherent inefficiency of NE and SNE, in which players can improve their performance and form stable coalitions. Finally, we apply distinct genetic algorithms (GA) to calculate the values for NE, SNE and the assigned cost for each player in each coalition, respectively. Analytical results are confirmed by the simulation on complex network topologies.