With the rapid growth of congestion-sensitive and data-intensive applications, traditional settlement-free peering agreements with best-effort delivery often do not meet the QoS requirements of content providers (CPs). Meanwhile, Internet access providers (IAPs) feel that revenues from end-users are not sufficient to recoup the upgrade costs of network infrastructures. Consequently, some IAPs have begun to offer CPs a new type of peering agreement, called paid peering, under which they provide CPs with better data delivery quality for a fee. In this article, we model a network platform where an IAP makes decisions on the peering types offered to CPs and the prices charged to CPs and end-users. We study the optimal peering schemes for the IAP, i.e., to offer CPs both the paid and settlement-free peering to choose from or only one of them, as the objective is profit or welfare maximization. Our results show that 1) the IAP should always offer the paid and settlement-free peering under the profit-optimal and welfare-optimal schemes, respectively, 2) whether to simultaneously offer the other peering type is largely driven by the type of data traffic, e.g., text or video, and 3) regulators might want to encourage the IAP to allocate more network capacity to the settlement-free peering for increasing user welfare.

中文翻译：

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付费对等，免结算对等，还是两者兼而有之？

随着对拥塞敏感和数据密集型应用程序的快速增长，具有尽力而为的传统无结算对等协议通常无法满足内容提供商（CP）的QoS要求。同时，互联网访问提供商（IAP）感到最终用户的收入不足以弥补网络基础架构的升级成本。因此，一些IAP已开始向CP提供一种新型的对等协议，称为付费对等协议，根据这些协议，它们可以付费为CP提供更好的数据交付质量。在本文中，我们对网络平台建模，在此平台上，IAP可以决定提供给CP的对等类型以及向CP和最终用户收取的价格。我们研究了适用于IAP的最佳对等方案，即为CP提供付费和免结算对等项，以供其选择或仅选择其中一种，因为目标是利润或福利最大化。我们的结果表明，1）IAP应始终分别在利润最优方案和福利最优方案下分别提供有偿和无结算的对等网络； 2）是否同时提供其他对等网络类型，在很大程度上取决于数据流量的类型。 （例如文本或视频），以及3）监管机构可能希望鼓励IAP为免结算对等方分配更多的网络容量，以增加用户的福利。