17,851 research outputs found
Water and Development Strategy: Implementation Field Guide
This document is intended to serve as a reference tool to help USAID Operating Units understand and apply the agency's 2013-2018 Water and Development Strategy. By publicly sharing the document, USAID aims to ensure coordination of their efforts with the wider water sector. The Field Guide will be periodically updated and comments from readers are welcome
Modeling Tiered Pricing in the Internet Transit Market
ISPs are increasingly selling "tiered" contracts, which offer Internet
connectivity to wholesale customers in bundles, at rates based on the cost of
the links that the traffic in the bundle is traversing. Although providers have
already begun to implement and deploy tiered pricing contracts, little is known
about how such pricing affects ISPs and their customers. While contracts that
sell connectivity on finer granularities improve market efficiency, they are
also more costly for ISPs to implement and more difficult for customers to
understand. In this work we present two contributions: (1) we develop a novel
way of mapping traffic and topology data to a demand and cost model; and (2) we
fit this model on three large real-world networks: an European transit ISP, a
content distribution network, and an academic research network, and run
counterfactuals to evaluate the effects of different pricing strategies on both
the ISP profit and the consumer surplus. We highlight three core findings.
First, ISPs gain most of the profits with only three or four pricing tiers and
likely have little incentive to increase granularity of pricing even further.
Second, we show that consumer surplus follows closely, if not precisely, the
increases in ISP profit with more pricing tiers. Finally, the common ISP
practice of structuring tiered contracts according to the cost of carrying the
traffic flows (e.g., offering a discount for traffic that is local) can be
suboptimal and that dividing contracts based on both traffic demand and the
cost of carrying it into only three or four tiers yields near-optimal profit
for the ISP
MORPHOSYS: efficient colocation of QoS-constrained workloads in the cloud
In hosting environments such as IaaS clouds, desirable application performance is usually guaranteed through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which specify minimal fractions of resource capacities that must be
allocated for use for proper operation. Arbitrary colocation of applications with different SLAs on a single host may result in inefficient utilization of the host’s resources. In this paper, we propose that periodic resource allocation and consumption models be used for a more granular expression of SLAs. Our proposed SLA model has the salient feature that it exposes flexibilities that enable the IaaS provider to safely transform SLAs from one form to another
for the purpose of achieving more efficient colocation. Towards that goal, we present MorphoSys: a framework for a service that allows the manipulation of SLAs to enable efficient colocation of workloads. We present results from extensive trace-driven simulations of colocated Video-on-Demand servers in a cloud setting. The results show that potentially-significant reduction in wasted resources (by as much as 60%) are possible using MorphoSys.First author draf
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