1. Introduction
In P2P applications, the participating nodes (or peers) form an overlay network which is largely agnostic on the underlying
IP network. This increases the cost associated with P2P traffic for individual Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that face the
problem of managing a vast amount of unnecessary inter-domain traffic [1]. Such traffic levels can cause congestion on
valuable inter-ISP links and more generally an overall performance degradation in an ISP network.
Prior studies pointed out that network-aware techniques may drastically reduce the inter-ISP traffic volume [2–4].
Moreover, for P2P streaming, the modeling study presented in [5] showed the positive effects of incorporating network
awareness in P2P streaming applications.
This paper focuses attention on the role of the ISPs. In particular, we do not consider them as simple providers of network
connectivity but as the main players for supporting P2P streaming platforms. To this aim the paper proposes a game theoretic
framework to help the design of techniques promoting the ISP cooperation in P2P streaming platforms. With the help of the
proposed models we derive strategies that can effectively stimulate ISP cooperation aiming at the minimization of inter-ISP
traffic by supporting a reliable P2P streaming service. In particular, the main contributions of the paper can be summarized
as follows.