Differential Pricing Strategies for Bandwidth Allocation with LFA Resilience: A Stackelberg Game Approach

Link flooding attacks (LFAs) have always been a security concern as the impact of volumetric attacks on transit links are increasingly severe. Capacity expansion, while being effective in combating LFAs, involves considerable deployment costs. Therefore, how to efficiently manage the link resource among spatio-temporal dynamic customers remains a challenge for Internet service providers (ISPs). In this paper, we study the differential pricing strategy for bandwidth allocation with LFA resilience by leveraging a multi-leader-multi-follower (MLMF) Stackelberg game approach. Based on network capabilities, we employ pricing approaches instead of empirical assignments to regulate the privileged channel allocation, economically facilitating the domain-level resource coordination. And we formulate the bandwidth pricing and allocation decision problem by using a Stackelberg game-theoretic approach to capture the interactions between providers and customers. Then, we analyze the Stackelberg game equilibrium of uniform pricing strategy and differential pricing strategy, where differential pricing is applied to adjust the prices that individual customers receive according to heterogeneous factors. Furthermore, we give the optimal solution derivation in the case of differential pricing. By comparing with other relevant pricing strategies, our numerical results show that the differential pricing strategy achieves congestion-free property and provides enough incentives for ISPs to deploy.