An information economy for single-service application layer multicast networks

Since the peers in application layer multicast network belong to different administrative domains, they are selfish. One of the main challenges in this area is designing self-organizing protocols capable to exploit this inherent selfishness in such a way that leads to maximization of the aggregate throughput of the network. In this paper, we have modeled the behaviors of the peers by leveraging the rich theory of strategic mechanism design of microeconomics. We consider the bandwidth of the service as the offered good in the auction. In our mapping, each service provider is thought of as the auctioneer. Also, the downstream peers are the buyers of the economy who submit their bidding values for the good at the auctioneer.