AN ECONOMIC MODEL FOR MULTI-SERVICE OVERLAY MULTICAST NETWORKS BASED ON WALRASIAN GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM

Overlay multicasting solution has recently been marked as a paradigm shift in order to disseminate data in application layer. Since the end-users may belong to different administrative domains, they are usually selfish; resulting in degradation of the aggregate throughput (welfare) of the network. Thus, the main challenge in order to design the mechanisms for such networks is exploiting the inherent selfishness of the end-users in such a way that the total welfare is maximized. This paper presents an economical model for multi-service overlay networks based on producer-consumer theory in which each offered service can be thought of as a good and the origin servers and the users who relay the service to their downstream nodes can thus be thought of as firms of the economy. Also, the end-users can be viewed as consumers in the economy. By leveraging the concept of Walrasian general equilibrium, the proposed model tunes the price of the services in such a way that the total demand equals the total supply. The bandwidth allocation by the proposed mechanism results in Pareto optimality of the system in the sense that the total welfare is maximized.