Research On Internet Decision Making Among Asymmetric Internet Backbone

Since the Internet was introduced into China in 1994,with the unstinting support and efforts of our government,the Internet industry has been developing rapidly in China.At present,there are 7 Internet backbone companies in our country.Among them,China Telecom and China Unicom are the two companies which dominant the market.The trend of polarization in the Internet market is obvious.Usually,the leading Internet backbone companies tend to provide small Internet backbone companies with lower quality of interconnection and charge high fees for peering,leaving small Internet backbones caught in an inferior position in the market.In addition,in terms of connection modes,our government,in consideration of network information security,only allows peering and prohibits transit between Internet backbones.This further reduced the competition among Internet backbones and limited the choice of small Internet backbone companies.Therefore,in order to form a competitive market and accelerate the development of Internet backbone,it is important to study the decision-making of interconnection among different scales of Internet backbones.This paper summarizes the present situation of Internet backbone interconnection in China,and points out that the development of Internet backbone still have some problems such as low interconnection quality,single interconnection mode,high cost of settlement,and lack of Internet laws.Based on the present situation of interconnection among Internet backbones in China,this article,by adding the research hypothesis of transit as well as constructing game model,analyses the influences on the interconnectional decisions caused by different scales of Internet backbones.It is concluded from decision analysis of quality of interconnection that the preference for Internet backbones to choose interconnection quality differs from the different scales between Internet backbones.When the network size difference is small,those asymmetric Internet backbones prefer a perfect interconnection.When the size is quite different,the preference for interconnection quality will remain uncertain.The anti-competition feature affiliated with those networks will have aseries of unfavorable influence on the development of the Internet backbones as paid peering is the most important connection mode in our country.Therefore,it is imperative to introduce transit.The conclusion drawn from our decision analysis in the ways of interconnection is that when the scale difference between the vulnerable backbone and the leading is relatively small,the backbone network will choose to peering with two leading backbone networks with the same scale.for interconnection mode of peering,it will be divided into two cases,when the scale of the vulnerable is symmetrical with the leading,the vulnerable backbone network will generally choose Bill-and-keep peering;when the disparities between the vulnerable and the leading are not large,the vulnerable backbone network will choose paid-peering.But when these differences are huge,it may switch to transit with one of the two networks.Based on the analysis of the experience of the interconnection among Internet backbones in the United States.In order to support vulnerable Internet backbones to build a more balanced and reasonable market structures so as to facilitate the virtuous circle of development of Internet backbones in our domestic Internet situations.This article have proposed some suggestion,and all this may be expected to provide some references for the development of our country's Internet backbones.