A non-cooperative game theory model for bandwidth allocation in network virtualization

Network virtualization is a new technology that aims to allow multiple virtual networks to coexist in the same equipment and hide the heterogeneity of network infrastructure. This technology leads the list of top strategies employed by ISPs to boost their green IT initiatives. A critical issue is how to provide customized and on demand resources for different service providers. Each infrastructure provider should fairly distribute network resources, such as bandwidth of each physical link, buffer space and processing time at each node. In this paper we present a novel game theoretic approach for bandwidth allocation between infrastructure providers (InPs) and service providers (SPs). The proposed approach is based on two-stage non-cooperative games. The first stage of game is the bandwidth negotiation game where a SP requests bandwidth from multiple InPs. Every InP decides whether to accept or to deny its request when the SP would cause link congestion. The second stage of the non-cooperative game is the bandwidth provisioning game, where different SPs compete for an amount of bandwidth in a shared physical link for a given infrastructure provider. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves higher bandwidth utilization, improves network performance, and fairly distributes bandwidth between multiple service providers.