Time-Dependent Pricing for Bandwidth Slicing under Information Asymmetry and Price Discrimination

Due to the bursty nature of Internet traffic, network service providers (NSPs) are forced to expand their network capacity in order to meet the ever-increasing peak-time traffic demand, which is however costly and inefficient. How to shift the traffic demand from peak time to off-peak time is a challenging task for NSPs. In this paper, we study the implementation of time-dependent pricing (TDP) for bandwidth slicing in software-defined cellular networks under information asymmetry and price discrimination. Congestion prices indicating real-time congestion levels of different links are used as a signal to motivate delay-tolerant users to defer their traffic demands. We formulate the joint pricing and bandwidth demand optimization problem as a two-stage Stackelberg leader-follower game. Then, we investigate how to derive the optimal solutions under the scenarios of both complete and incomplete information. We also extend the results from the simplified case of a single congested link to the more complicated case of multiple congested links, where price discrimination is employed to dynamically adjust the price of each congested link in accordance with its real-time congestion level. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed pricing scheme achieves superior performance in increasing the NSP's revenue and reducing the peak-to-average traffic ratio (PATR).This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Number 61971189, the Science and Technology Project of State Grid Corporation of China under Grant Number SGSDDK00KJJS1900405, the Exploration Project of State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources (North China Electric Power University) under Grant Number LAPS2019-12, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant Number 2020MS001, and the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant Number 2019YFB1704702. This article was presented in part at the International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC’18), Limassol, Cyprus, 2018. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was T. He. (Corresponding author: Bo Gu.) Zhenyu Zhou is with the State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System With Renewable Energy Sources, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 10220

E-Fulfillment and Multi-Channel Distribution – A Review

This review addresses the specific supply chain management issues of Internet fulfillment in a multi-channel environment. It provides a systematic overview of managerial planning tasks and reviews corresponding quantitative models. In this way, we aim to enhance the understanding of multi-channel e-fulfillment and to identify gaps between relevant managerial issues and academic literature, thereby indicating directions for future research. One of the recurrent patterns in today’s e-commerce operations is the combination of ‘bricks-and-clicks’, the integration of e-fulfillment into a portfolio of multiple alternative distribution channels. From a supply chain management perspective, multi-channel distribution provides opportunities for serving different customer segments, creating synergies, and exploiting economies of scale. However, in order to successfully exploit these opportunities companies need to master novel challenges. In particular, the design of a multi-channel distribution system requires a constant trade-off between process integration and separation across multiple channels. In addition, sales and operations decisions are ever more tightly intertwined as delivery and after-sales services are becoming key components of the product offering.Distribution;E-fulfillment;Literature Review;Online Retailing

Proof-of-Concept Application - Annual Report Year 2

This document first gives an introduction to Application Layer Networks and subsequently presents the catallactic resource allocation model and its integration into the middleware architecture of the developed prototype. Furthermore use cases for employed service models in such scenarios are presented as general application scenarios as well as two very detailed cases: Query services and Data Mining services. This work concludes by describing the middleware implementation and evaluation as well as future work in this area. --Grid Computing

Joint rate control and scheduling for providing bounded delay with high efficiency in multihop wireless networks

This thesis considers the problem of supporting traffic with elastic bandwidth requirements and hard end-to-end delay constraints in multi-hop wireless networks, with focus on source transmission rates and link data rates as the key resource allocation decisions. Specifically, the research objective is to develop a source rate control and scheduling strategy that guarantees bounded average end-to-end queueing delay and maximises the overall utility of all incoming traffic, using network utility maximisation framework. The network utility maximisation based approaches to support delay-sensitive traffic have been predominantly based on either reducing link utilisation, or approximation of links as M/D/1 queues. Both approaches lead to unpredictable transient behaviour of packet delays, and inefficient link utilisation under optimal resource allocation. On the contrary, in this thesis an approach is proposed where instead of hard delay constraints based on inaccurate M/D/1 delay estimates, traffic end-to-end delay requirements are guaranteed by proper forms of concave and increasing utility functions of their transmission rates. Specifically, an alternative formulation is presented where the delay constraint is omitted and sources’ utility functions are multiplied by a weight factor. The alternative optimisation problem is solved by a distributed scheduling algorithm incorporating a duality-based rate control algorithm at its inner layer, where optimal link prices correlate with their average queueing delays. The proposed approach is then realised by a scheduling algorithm that runs jointly with an integral controller whereby each source regulates the queueing delay on its paths at the desired level, using its utility weight coefficient as the control variable. Since the proposed algorithms are based on solving the alternative concave optimisation problem, they are simple, distributed and lead to maximal link utilisation. Hence, they avoid the limitations of the previous approaches. The proposed algorithms are shown, using both theoretical analysis and simulation, to achieve asymptotic regulation of end-to-end delay given the step size of the proposed integral controller is within a specified range

Information Technology, Workplace Organization and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence

Recently, the relative demand for skilled labor has increased dramatically. We investigate one of the causes, skill-biased technical change. Advances in information technology (IT) are among the most powerful forces bearing on the economy. Employers who use IT often make complementary innovations in their organizations and in the services they offer. Our hypothesis is that these co-inventions by IT users change the mix of skills that employers demand. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that it is a cluster of complementary changes involving IT, workplace organization and services that is the key skill-biased technical change. We examine new firm-level data linking several indicators of IT use, workplace organization, and the demand for skilled labor. In both a short-run factor demand framework and a production function framework, we find evidence for complementarity. IT use is complementary to a new workplace organization which includes broader job responsibilities for line workers, more decentralized decision-making, and more self-managing teams. In turn, both IT and that new organization are complements with worker skill, measured in a variety of ways. Further, the managers in our survey believe that IT increases skill requirements and autonomy among workers in their firms. Taken together, the results highlight the roles of both IT and IT-enabled organizational change as important components of the skill-biased technical change.

Dynamic bandwidth allocation in multi-class IP networks using utility functions.

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