On the interaction between content-oriented traffic scheduling and revenue sharing among providers

The Internet consists of economically selfish players in terms of access/transit connection, content distribution, and users. Such selfish behaviors often lead to techno-economic inefficiencies such as unstable peering and revenue imbalance. Recent research results suggest that cooperation in revenue sharing (thus multi-level ISP settlements) can be a candidate solution for the problem of unfair revenue share. However, it is unclear whether providers are willing to behave cooperatively. In this paper, we study the interaction between how content-oriented traffic scheduling at the edge is and how stable the intended cooperation is. We consider three traffic scheduling policies having various degrees of content-value preference, compare them in terms of implementation complexity, network neutrality, and stability of cooperation, and present interesting trade-offs among them.