A coalitional game approach on improving interactions in multiple overlay environments
The overlay network has been widely deployed by Service Providers (SPs) to provide services. Since there are multiple SPs built upon the same Internet Service Provider (ISP), their overlays are co-existing and may interfere with each other. The selfishness of overlay may lead to sub-optimal performance and traffic arrangement dilemma for overlays. To optimize the performance of overlays and maximize the benefit of SPs, we propose a cooperative overlay optimization approach, in which overlays can form coalitions freely for the purpose of cooperation. This approach performs a two-step process: the coalition optimization process and the coalition formation process. Several models are applied to describe these two processes. The overlay routing problem of a coalition, the revenue allocation problem, and the convergence problem of coalition formation are analyzed and solved. In the coalition formation process, the relationship between co-existing overlays is also analyzed. Simulations are performed to evaluate our approach, which is proved to be effective on improving the performance and balancing the fairness of co-existing overlays.