NEGOTIATION PROTOCOL FOR CONNECTION ESTABLISHMENT WITH SEVERAL COMPETING NETWORK PROVIDERS

In the future, more and more network providers will be established thr ough the introduction of an open telecommunications market. At this ti me, it is necessary to guarantee the fair competition between these ne twork providers. In this paper, a negotiation protocol for connection establishment is proposed. This negotiation protocol is based on the c oncept of open, competitive bidding and can guarantee fair competition between the network providers. In this negotiation protocol, each net work provider's objective is to maximize its profit. Conversely, each user's objective is to select a network provider which will supply as much capacity as required. Employing this negotiation protocol, the us ers and the network providers can select each other based on their obj ectives. In this paper, adaptation strategies which network providers and users can adopt under the proposed negotiation protocol framework are also discussed. A network provider which adopts this strategy can obtain enough profit even when the number of connection requests is sm all relative to the idle bandwidth capacity. Moreover, a user who adop ts this strategy can be sure to obtain bandwidth even when the idle ba ndwidth capacity is small relative to the number of connection request s.