On the Mediation Price War of 5G Providers

Abstract

Virtualization guarantees that, moving toward 5G, online services will be versatile and the creation of those will be quick, satisfying the interest of end-clients to a higher degree than what is plausible today. Telcos, cloud administrators, and online application suppliers will unite for conveying those services to clients around the world. Thus, in order to help their portability, or the simple geographic range of the offered application, the business arrangements among the actors must scale over numerous domains and a guaranteed nature of joint effort among different stakeholders is important. Therefore, the vision of the 5G environment is majorly established on the federation of these partners in which they can consistently strive towards the objective of making reliable resource slices and deploying applications within for a maximal geographic reach of clients. In this environment, business perspectives will significantly impact the technical capacity of the system: the business arrangements of the providers will innately decide the accessibility and the end-client costs of certain services. In this work, we model the business relations of infrastructure providers as a variation of network formation games. We infer conditions under which the current transit-peering structure of network providers stays unblemished, and we also draw the specifics of an envisioned setup in which providers create business links among each other starting with a clean slate.