Information & communication technologies - panacea for traffic congestion?

As road pricing, telematics and logistics evolve, information and communication technologies (ICT) aim directly at making traffic flow more efficiently in a given infrastructure. Furthermore, the virtual world gives rise to new business fields and decentralised structures which affect the development of transport indirectly. While technological progress continues to drive qualitative improvements in traffic conditions, e-business and telework in particular have, for structural reasons, a much less pronounced effect on traffic than widely presumed. ICT helps in organising traffic flows more efficiently and plays a supplementary role as transport-relevant instrument, but it is not a panacea for traffic congestion.traffic, autobahn, ICT, LBS, mobile telephony

A smart market for passenger road transport (SMPRT) congestion: an application of computational mechanism design

To control and price negative externalities in passenger road transport, we develop an innovative and integrated computational agent based economics (ACE) model to simulate a market oriented "cap" and trade system. (i) First, there is a computational assessment of a digitized road network model of the real world congestion hot spot to determine the "cap" of the system in terms of vehicle volumes at which traffic efficiency deteriorates and the environmental externalities take off exponentially. (ii) Road users submit bids with the market clearing price at the fixed "cap" supply of travel slots in a given time slice (peak hour) being determined by an electronic sealed bid uniform price Dutch auction. (iii) Cross-sectional demand data on car users who traverse the cordon area is used to model and calibrate the heterogeneous bid submission behaviour in order to construct the inverse demand function and demand elasticities. (iv) The willingness to pay approach with heterogeneous value of time is contrasted with the generalized cost approach to pricing congestion with homogeneous value of travel time.

The Role of Responsive Pricing in the Internet

The Internet continues to evolve as it reaches out to a wider user population. The recent introduction of user-friendly navigation and retrieval tools for the World Wide Web has triggered an unprecedented level of interest in the Internet among the media and the general public, as well as in the technical community. It seems inevitable that some changes or additions are needed in the control mechanisms used to allocate usage of Internet resources. In this paper, we argue that a feedback signal in the form of a variable price for network service is a workable tool to aid network operators in controlling Internet traffic. We suggest that these prices should vary dynamically based on the current utilization of network resources. We show how this responsive pricing puts control of network service back where it belongs: with the users.Internet, pricing, feedback, networks

Network Neutrality or Internet Innovation?

Over the past two decades, the Internet has undergone an extensive re-ordering of its topology that has resulted in increased variation in the price and quality of its services. Innovations such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Relatedly, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements and pricing. This variation has been interpreted by some as network providers attempting to promote their self interest at the expense of the public. In fact, these changes reflect network providers’ attempts to reduce cost, manage congestion, and maintain quality of service. Current policy proposals to constrain this variation risk harming these beneficial developments.

Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges

The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi, Indi