Premium
Inter‐domain pricing: challenges and possible approaches
Author(s) -
Tran HoangHai,
Tuffin Bruno
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
international journal of network management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1099-1190
pISSN - 1055-7148
DOI - 10.1002/nem.760
Subject(s) - computer science , collusion , incentive , domain (mathematical analysis) , context (archaeology) , operations research , microeconomics , economics , paleontology , mathematics , mathematical analysis , biology , engineering
Telecommunication networks are now an interconnection of competitive operators that need to cooperate to ensure end‐to‐end delivery of traffic. Inter‐domain agreements have to be performed, and pricing is seen as a relevant way to provide an incentive to intermediate domains for forwarding the traffic of others. In this paper, we first review propositions from the literature. Greatest consideration is given to the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) auction because it provides appropriate incentives, leads to an efficient use of the network and satisfies other relevant properties. We highlight, on the other hand, that it is neither budget‐balanced nor robust to collusion—something forgotten in the inter‐domain context. This brings us to review the list of properties that we would ideally like the inter‐domain pricing scheme to satisfy, and claim that no mechanism can satisfy all of them together. We then adapt to inter‐domain other resource allocation and pricing schemes, and discuss which properties are or should be relaxed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.