Using Tuangou to reduce IP transit costs

A majority of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) support connectivity to the entire Internet by transiting their traffic via other providers. Although the transit prices per Mbps decline steadily, the overall transit costs of these ISPs remain high or even increase, due to the traffic growth. The discontent of the ISPs with the high transit costs has yielded notable innovations such as peering, content distribution networks, multicast, and peer-to-peer localization. While the above solutions tackle the problem by reducing the transit traffic, this paper explores a novel approach that reduces the transit costs without altering the traffic. In the proposed CIPT (Cooperative IP Transit), multiple ISPs cooperate to jointly purchase IP (Internet Protocol) transit in bulk. The aggregate transit costs decrease due to the economies-of-scale effect of typical subadditive pricing as well as burstable billing: not all ISPs transit their peak traffic during the same period. To distribute the aggregate savings among the CIPT partners, we propose Shapley-value sharing of the CIPT transit costs. Using public data about IP traffic of 264 ISPs and transit prices, we quantitatively evaluate CIPT and show that significant savings can be achieved, both in relative and absolute terms. We also discuss the organizational embodiment, relationship with transit providers, traffic confidentiality, and other aspects of CIPT

Peering Strategic Game Models for Interdependent ISPs in Content Centric Internet

Emergent content-oriented networks prompt Internet service providers (ISPs) to evolve and take major responsibility for content delivery. Numerous content items and varying content popularities motivate interdependence between peering ISPs to elaborate their content caching and sharing strategies. In this paper, we propose the concept of peering for content exchange between interdependent ISPs in content centric Internet to minimize content delivery cost by a proper peering strategy. We model four peering strategic games to formulate four types of peering relationships between ISPs who are characterized by varying degrees of cooperative willingness from egoism to altruism and interconnected as profit-individuals or profit-coalition. Simulation results show the price of anarchy (PoA) and communication cost in the four games to validate that ISPs should decide their peering strategies by balancing intradomain content demand and interdomain peering relations for an optimal cost of content delivery

T4P: Hybrid interconnection for cost reduction

Abstract—Economic forces behind the Internet evolution have diversified the types of ISP (Internet Service Provider) intercon-nections. In particular, settlement-free peering and paid peering proved themselves as effective means for reducing ISP costs. In this paper, we propose T4P (Transit for Peering), a new type of hybrid bilateral ISP relationships that continues the Internet trend towards more flexible interconnections at lower costs. With a T4P interconnection, one ISP compensates the other ISP for their peering by providing this other ISP with a partial-transit service. In comparison to paid peering, T4P is able to reduce the combined transit/peering costs of an ISP due to the subadditive nature of transit billing. As a cost-effective alternative to existing interconnection types, T4P expands and strengthens the connectivity of the Internet, e.g., between content and eyeball networks. After analyzing incentives of ISPs to adopt T4P, we use real traffic data from several IXPs (Internet eXchange Points) to quantify the T4P economic benefits. Our evaluation confirms the promising potential of T4P. I

Understanding the Internet as a Human Right

Around the world, fundamental human rights have undergone a dramatic conceptual shift as a result of the spread of the Internet. The right to freedom of expression, once largely limited to printing, has exploded in a digital world that provides users with an unprecedented megaphone to broadcast their views. The right to political participation and the right to free assembly have similarly been reborn in an age of instant communication, allowing activists to mobilise hundreds of thousands of followers with a single email, text or tweet. Although these are the most notable examples, the Internet has also had a transformative impact on several other recognised human rights, including the right to education, to healthcare and to work. The Internet’s role in the enabling and delivery of human rights has led some to claim that access to the Internet itself should be considered a human right, an idea that has deep implications for both international law and domestic legal frameworks. If, indeed, access to the Internet is a human right, it adds an additional dimension to regulatory issues, since overly restrictive laws that compromise access or damage the vitality or utility of the Internet become more than just bad policy. In some cases, they may constitute violations of international human rights standards. This Paper discusses the Internet’s recognition as a human right and the implications that spring from this recognition in domestic and international law