Interactions among Overlays and Traffic Engineering: Equilibrium and Cooperation without Payment

Emerging overlay technologies have enabled to distribute content efficiently over the Internet that in some sense improves the user quality of experience. However, due to inconsistent or even conflicting objectives from the perspectives of multiple co-existing overlay networks and traffic engineering (TE), the interaction among them impacts the performance of each other and results in sub- optimum, which also has not yet been investigated in detail. In this paper, we model this interaction as an n+1-person non-cooperative game, prove the existence of Nash equilibrium point (NEP) and propose an algorithm to compute NEP. In order to overcome the inefficiency of NEP, we define a non-transferable utility (NTU) game based on Shapley NTU game theory, in which overlays and TE share cost efficiently and fairly without side payment, and we propose an algorithm to calculate the Shapley NTU value (SNTUV).