Streaming games: P2P vs ISPs or P2P with ISPs?

The overlay/underlay topology mismatch affects the performance of existing P2P platforms that can generate large volumes of unnecessary inter-ISP network traffic. Although recent works have shown the benefits of network awareness P2P solutions, no studies have focused on the investigation of the ISP behavior and their cooperative/non-cooperative attitudes. This paper proposes a game theoretic framework to help the design of techniques promoting the ISP cooperation in P2P streaming platforms. We first analyze a two-ISP game and for this simple scenario we discuss the Nash equilibrium, the Pareto optimality, and a fairness criterion to refine the equilibrium points. Moreover, we apply ideas from Evolutionary Game Theory to the ISP game in a large ISP population. The models presented in the paper show that the proposed strategies can effectively stimulate ISP cooperation aiming at the minimization of inter-ISP traffic and help to provide reliable P2P streaming service.