3,243 research outputs found
On Optimal Service Differentiation in Congested Network Markets
As Internet applications have become more diverse in recent years, users
having heavy demand for online video services are more willing to pay higher
prices for better services than light users that mainly use e-mails and instant
messages. This encourages the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to explore
service differentiations so as to optimize their profits and allocation of
network resources. Much prior work has focused on the viability of network
service differentiation by comparing with the case of a single-class service.
However, the optimal service differentiation for an ISP subject to resource
constraints has remained unsolved. In this work, we establish an optimal
control framework to derive the analytical solution to an ISP's optimal service
differentiation, i.e. the optimal service qualities and associated prices. By
analyzing the structures of the solution, we reveal how an ISP should adjust
the service qualities and prices in order to meet varying capacity constraints
and users' characteristics. We also obtain the conditions under which ISPs have
strong incentives to implement service differentiation and whether regulators
should encourage such practices
Innovation and the Evolution of Market Structure for Internet Access in the United States
How and why did the U.S. commercial Internet access market structure evolve during its first decade? Commercial Internet access market structure arose from a propitious combination of inherited market structures from communications and computing, where a variety of firms already flourished and entrepreneurial norms prevailed. This setting nurtured innovative behavior across such key features as pricing, operational practices, and geographic coverage. Inherited regulatory decisions in communications markets had a nurturing effect on innovative activity. On-going regulatory decisions also shaped the market’s evolution, sometimes nurturing innovation and sometimes not. This narrative and analysis informs conjectures about several unique features of U.S. market structure and innovative behavior. It also informs policy debates today about the role of regulation in nurturing or discouraging innovation behavior.
Extending the product portfolio with ‘devolved manufacturing’: Methodology and case studies
Current research by the developers of rapid prototyping systems is generally focused on improvements in cost, speed and materials to create truly economic and practical economic rapid manufacturing machines. In addition to being potentially smarter/faster/cheaper replacements for existing manufacturing technologies, the next generation of these machines will provide opportunities not only for the design and fabrication of products without traditional constraints, but also for organizing manufacturing activities in new, innovative and previously undreamt of ways. This paper outlines a novel devolved manufacturing (DM) ‘factory-less’ approach to e-manufacturing, which integrates Mass Customization (MC) concepts, Rapid Manufacturing (RM) technologies and the communication opportunities of the Internet/WWW, describes two case studies of different DM implementations and discusses the limitations and appropriateness of each, and finally, draws some conclusions about the technical, manufacturing and business challenges involved
Prospectives in Deep Space Infrastructures, Development, and Colonization
The realization of the long studied cost reduction benefits of reusable rockets is expected to revolutionize and enable both commercial deep space beyond Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and solar system human colonization. The projections for a myriad of space commercialization activities beyond the current largely positional Earth utilities and Humans Mars both safe and affordable may now be realizable. This report considers these putative commercial and colonizationrelated activities, the emerging technologies, the space functionalities to support and further enable them, and envisions the nature of space developments beyond GEO going forward
cISP: A Speed-of-Light Internet Service Provider
Low latency is a requirement for a variety of interactive network
applications. The Internet, however, is not optimized for latency. We thus
explore the design of cost-effective wide-area networks that move data over
paths very close to great-circle paths, at speeds very close to the speed of
light in vacuum. Our cISP design augments the Internet's fiber with free-space
wireless connectivity. cISP addresses the fundamental challenge of
simultaneously providing low latency and scalable bandwidth, while accounting
for numerous practical factors ranging from transmission tower availability to
packet queuing. We show that instantiations of cISP across the contiguous
United States and Europe would achieve mean latencies within 5% of that
achievable using great-circle paths at the speed of light, over medium and long
distances. Further, we estimate that the economic value from such networks
would substantially exceed their expense
Peering, Transit, Interconnection: Internet Access in Central Europe
This paper presents a review of the alternatives for Internet access in Central Europe and the evolution of the
market, the regulation, and the technology. The change in peering, the reduction in transport costs, the reduction
in transit costs have dramatically changed the overall supply side of the market for Internet services in Central
Europe. This paper assess the current market and how these regulatory and technological changes are
accelerating the demand side as well and how such alternative paradigms for interconnection may impact other
regional markets
Rethinking Routing and Peering in the era of Vertical Integration of Network Functions
Content providers typically control the digital content consumption services and are getting the most revenue by implementing an all-you-can-eat model via subscription or hyper-targeted advertisements. Revamping the existing Internet architecture and design, a vertical integration where a content provider and access ISP will act as unibody in a sugarcane form seems to be the recent trend. As this vertical integration trend is emerging in the ISP market, it is questionable if existing routing architecture will suffice in terms of sustainable economics, peering, and scalability. It is expected that the current routing will need careful modifications and smart innovations to ensure effective and reliable end-to-end packet delivery. This involves new feature developments for handling traffic with reduced latency to tackle routing scalability issues in a more secure way and to offer new services at cheaper costs. Considering the fact that prices of DRAM or TCAM in legacy routers are not necessarily decreasing at the desired pace, cloud computing can be a great solution to manage the increasing computation and memory complexity of routing functions in a centralized manner with optimized expenses. Focusing on the attributes associated with existing routing cost models and by exploring a hybrid approach to SDN, we also compare recent trends in cloud pricing (for both storage and service) to evaluate whether it would be economically beneficial to integrate cloud services with legacy routing for improved cost-efficiency. In terms of peering, using the US as a case study, we show the overlaps between access ISPs and content providers to explore the viability of a future in terms of peering between the new emerging content-dominated sugarcane ISPs and the healthiness of Internet economics. To this end, we introduce meta-peering, a term that encompasses automation efforts related to peering – from identifying a list of ISPs likely to peer, to injecting control-plane rules, to continuous monitoring and notifying any violation – one of the many outcroppings of vertical integration procedure which could be offered to the ISPs as a standalone service
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