70 research outputs found
IP-based NGNs and Interconnection: The Debate in Europe
Historically, interconnection in the world of the Internet has been approached significantly differently from interconnection in the fixed Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the mobile Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN). As fixed and mobile networks evolve to Next Generation Networks (NGNs) based on the Internet Protocol (IP), it becomes increasingly necessary to merge these perspectives in order to achieve a unified and integrated approach to network interconnection. There is a rich history of economic analysis of IP-based and of conventional switched networks that began to converge early in this decade. In 2008, this issue is coming to a boil, as regulators seek to provide regulatory certainty for the build-out of NGNs, even in the face of substantial uncertainties, and even though practical experience with NGNs is still in a very preliminary state. What can we learn from the historical evolution of the theory of interconnection for Internet, NGN, PSTN and PLMN? What issues are "in play" today? What is the appropriate destination in the long term? What nearer term measures are appropriate?interconnection, NGN, Internet Protocol (IP), bill and keep, Calling Party's Network Pays (CPNP), peering, transit.
Power-Law Distributions in a Two-sided Market and Net Neutrality
"Net neutrality" often refers to the policy dictating that an Internet
service provider (ISP) cannot charge content providers (CPs) for delivering
their content to consumers. Many past quantitative models designed to determine
whether net neutrality is a good idea have been rather equivocal in their
conclusions. Here we propose a very simple two-sided market model, in which the
types of the consumers and the CPs are {\em power-law distributed} --- a kind
of distribution known to often arise precisely in connection with
Internet-related phenomena. We derive mostly analytical, closed-form results
for several regimes: (a) Net neutrality, (b) social optimum, (c) maximum
revenue by the ISP, or (d) maximum ISP revenue under quality differentiation.
One unexpected conclusion is that (a) and (b) will differ significantly, unless
average CP productivity is very high
Too Expensive to Meter: The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication
Technology appears to be making fine-scale charging (as in tolls on roads that depend on time of day or even on current and anticipated levels of congestion) increasingly feasible. And such charging appears to be increasingly desirable, as traffic on roads continues to grow, and costs and public opposition limit new construction. Similar incentives towards fine-scale charging also appear to be operating in communications and other areas, such as electricity usage. Standard economic theory supports such measures, and technology is being developed and deployed to implement them. But their spread is not very rapid, and prospects for the future are uncertain. This paper presents a collection of sketches, some from ancient history, some from current developments, that illustrate the costs that charging imposes. Some of those costs are explicit (in terms of the monetary costs to users, and the costs of implementing the charging mechanisms). Others are implicit, such as the time or the mental processing costs of users. These argue that the case for fine-scale charging is not unambiguous, and that in many cases may be inappropriate.transportation, communication, transaction costs, collection costs
Designing and Developing an Online Services System: A Case of Maybank Students' Residential Hall
When internet services became cheap and available in the world, many organizations use it to enhance its benefits and to communicate with users in anywhere and anytime. Because that most universities used the facilities in online services to increase their abilities in organizing work. Online services are not limited to use in the universities for e-learning only. Although, the students who interact with online services increasingly, a common problem is that students online services need more efficient interaction. In other words, the sites lack usability; this research to design and develop an online services system for Maybank Students’ Residential Hall aid to solve this problem and to support the communication between students and residential hall staff
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" – 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 COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología “Francisco Jose ́ de Caldas”
Subsidization Competition: Vitalizing the Neutral Internet
Unlike telephone operators, which pay termination fees to reach the users of
another network, Internet Content Providers (CPs) do not pay the Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) of users they reach. While the consequent cross
subsidization to CPs has nurtured content innovations at the edge of the
Internet, it reduces the investment incentives for the access ISPs to expand
capacity. As potential charges for terminating CPs' traffic are criticized
under the net neutrality debate, we propose to allow CPs to voluntarily
subsidize the usagebased fees induced by their content traffic for end-users.
We model the regulated subsidization competition among CPs under a neutral
network and show how deregulation of subsidization could increase an access
ISP's utilization and revenue, strengthening its investment incentives.
Although the competition might harm certain CPs, we find that the main cause
comes from high access prices rather than the existence of subsidization. Our
results suggest that subsidization competition will increase the
competitiveness and welfare of the Internet content market; however, regulators
might need to regulate access prices if the access ISP market is not
competitive enough. We envision that subsidization competition could become a
viable model for the future Internet
Lives and deaths of cybercafés: mobile internet to blame
This study sought to undertake a statistical and computational study of the factors behind the drastic fall in the number of patrons frequenting Internet cafés. The study used data gathered from business owners of selected cafés in Ghana, a typical Third World country, where infrastructure deficit meant the broader majority used Internet services such as surfing the Web and accessing e-mails until very recently, mainly at cafés. Likewise, people using smartphones to access the Internet were also interviewed to obtain their views on the Internet usage patterns. The principal finding of the study was that most patrons of Internet cafés now prefer to do that on their smartphones mainly because it is cheaper and more convenient and also because of security concerns they attached to their data being intercepted by would-be criminals also patronizing cafés. Additionally, patrons complained of usually very old desktop computers at cafés badly infected with viruses that often infected and destroyed their files
Incentive Mechanisms for Internet Congestion Management: Fixed-Budget Rebate versus Time-of-Day Pricing
Mobile data traffic has been steadily rising in the past years. This has
generated a significant interest in the deployment of incentive mechanisms to
reduce peak-time congestion. Typically, the design of these mechanisms requires
information about user demand and sensitivity to prices. Such information is
naturally imperfect. In this paper, we propose a \emph{fixed-budget rebate
mechanism} that gives each user a reward proportional to his percentage
contribution to the aggregate reduction in peak time demand. For comparison, we
also study a time-of-day pricing mechanism that gives each user a fixed reward
per unit reduction of his peak-time demand. To evaluate the two mechanisms, we
introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the \emph{public good} nature of
decongestion. For each mechanism, we demonstrate that the socially optimal
level of decongestion is achievable for a specific choice of the mechanism's
parameter. We then investigate how imperfect information about user demand
affects the mechanisms' effectiveness. From our results, the fixed-budget
rebate pricing is more robust when the users' sensitivity to congestion is
"sufficiently" convex. This feature of the fixed-budget rebate mechanism is
attractive for many situations of interest and is driven by its closed-loop
property, i.e., the unit reward decreases as the peak-time demand decreases.Comment: To appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin
Pushing BitTorrent Locality to the Limit
Peer-to-peer (P2P) locality has recently raised a lot of interest in the
community. Indeed, whereas P2P content distribution enables financial savings
for the content providers, it dramatically increases the traffic on inter-ISP
links. To solve this issue, the idea to keep a fraction of the P2P traffic
local to each ISP was introduced a few years ago. Since then, P2P solutions
exploiting locality have been introduced. However, several fundamental issues
on locality still need to be explored. In particular, how far can we push
locality, and what is, at the scale of the Internet, the reduction of traffic
that can be achieved with locality? In this paper, we perform extensive
experiments on a controlled environment with up to 10 000 BitTorrent clients to
evaluate the impact of high locality on inter-ISP links traffic and peers
download completion time. We introduce two simple mechanisms that make high
locality possible in challenging scenarios and we show that we save up to
several orders of magnitude inter-ISP traffic compared to traditional locality
without adversely impacting peers download completion time. In addition, we
crawled 214 443 torrents representing 6 113 224 unique peers spread among 9 605
ASes. We show that whereas the torrents we crawled generated 11.6 petabytes of
inter-ISP traffic, our locality policy implemented for all torrents would have
reduced the global inter-ISP traffic by 40%
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