3,924 research outputs found
Trade & Cap: A Customer-Managed, Market-Based System for Trading Bandwidth Allowances at a Shared Link
We propose Trade & Cap (T&C), an economics-inspired mechanism that incentivizes users to voluntarily coordinate their consumption of the bandwidth of a shared resource (e.g., a DSLAM link) so as to converge on what they perceive to be an equitable allocation, while ensuring efficient resource utilization. Under T&C, rather than acting as an arbiter, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) acts as an enforcer of what the community of rational users sharing the resource decides is a fair allocation of that resource. Our T&C mechanism proceeds in two phases. In the first, software agents acting on behalf of users engage in a strategic trading game in which each user agent selfishly chooses bandwidth slots to reserve in support of primary, interactive network usage activities. In the second phase, each user is allowed to acquire additional bandwidth slots in support of presumed open-ended need for fluid bandwidth, catering to secondary applications. The acquisition of this fluid bandwidth is subject to the remaining "buying power" of each user and by prevalent "market prices" ā both of which are determined by the results of the trading phase and a desirable aggregate cap on link utilization. We present analytical results that establish the underpinnings of our T&C mechanism, including game-theoretic results pertaining to the trading phase, and pricing of fluid bandwidth allocation pertaining to the capping phase. Using real network traces, we present extensive experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of our scheme, which we also show to be practical by highlighting the salient features of an efficient implementation architecture.National Science Foundation (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, and CNS-0520166); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and COLCIENCIASāInstituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la TecnologĆa āFrancisco Jose Ģ de Caldasā
Tragedy of the common canal
This paper uses laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of alternative solutions to a common-pool resource with a unidirectional flow. The focus is on the comparative economic efficiency of communications, bilateral āCoasianā bargaining, auctions and price-based allocations. All treatments improve allocative efficiency relative to a baseline environment. Communication and bilateral bargaining are not generally as effective as market allocations. An exogenously imposed, optimal fee results in the greatest efficiency gain, followed by auction allocations that determine the usage fee endogenously.externalities, experiments, auctions, Coasian bargaining, common pool resource
Stochastic Optimization of Service Provision with Selfish Users
We develop a computationally efficient technique to solve a fairly general
distributed service provision problem with selfish users and imperfect
information. In particular, in a context in which the service capacity of the
existing infrastructure can be partially adapted to the user load by activating
just some of the service units, we aim at finding the configuration of active
service units that achieves the best trade-off between maintenance (e.g.\
energetic) costs for the provider and user satisfaction. The core of our
technique resides in the implementation of a belief-propagation (BP) algorithm
to evaluate the cost configurations. Numerical results confirm the
effectiveness of our approach.Comment: paper presented at NETSTAT Workshop, Budapest - June 201
Notes on Cloud computing principles
This letter provides a review of fundamental distributed systems and economic
Cloud computing principles. These principles are frequently deployed in their
respective fields, but their inter-dependencies are often neglected. Given that
Cloud Computing first and foremost is a new business model, a new model to sell
computational resources, the understanding of these concepts is facilitated by
treating them in unison. Here, we review some of the most important concepts
and how they relate to each other
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