Modeling the Techno-Economic Interactions of Infrastructure and Service Providers in 5G Networks With a Multi-Leader-Follower Game

The decoupling of infrastructure from services, which has been so far a mainstream paradigm in the computational and storage domain, is now becoming a paradigm also for mobile networks. Indeed, 5G must provide a variety of services with very diverse requirements, such as throughput, latency, or reliability, and decoupling infrastructure from service provisioning allows to deal with such heterogeneity. In this context, a new business model, involving two different stakeholders, Infrastructure Providers and Service Providers, has emerged. Besides addressing the technical issues, it is also important to study the economic feasibility and behavior of such new paradigm and the techno-economic interactions among the different stakeholders that play different roles in the mobile network market. In this paper, we propose a multi-leader multi-follower variant of the Stackelberg game to model the considered environment. The proposed model is then fed with realistic data and used to analyze the system behavior and the impact of the technological features of the stakeholders on their competitiveness.