Pricing for QoS provisioning across multiple Internet service provider domains

In this paper we introduce a pricing scheme to be employed between a group of Internet service providers (ISPs) and a customer who wishes to initiate a packet flow from a fixed origin to a fixed destination. The ISPs are transparent to the customer who relies on a third party company for both the choice of the relevant ISPs and the unit flow price negotiated. The customer pays only for that portion of the traffic, which meets a predefined maximum tolerable total delay within the ISP networks. After taking in a fixed percentage of total profit, the third party redistributes the remaining benefits to the ISPs according to a sharing mechanism, which reflects both, the QoS the ISPs declare they will meet, as well as their real performance. The pricing emerges as the result of a Stackelberg game with the third party as the leader and the ISPs as the followers.