5,878 research outputs found
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
The End of Net Neutrality
In 2005, the FCC changed the competitive landscape of the high-speed Internet access industry by classifying both DSL and cable modem service as information services. While many hail this move as a victory for competition and free markets, others fear the ruling could jeopardize the future of the Internet. This iBrief examines the potential end of net neutrality and concludes that new federal regulations are unnecessary because antitrust laws and a competitive marketplace will provide consumers with sufficient protection
VirtFogSim: A parallel toolbox for dynamic energy-delay performance testing and optimization of 5G Mobile-Fog-Cloud virtualized platforms
It is expected that the pervasive deployment of multi-tier 5G-supported Mobile-Fog-Cloudtechnological computing platforms will constitute an effective means to support the real-time execution of future Internet applications by resource- and energy-limited mobile devices. Increasing interest in this emerging networking-computing technology demands the optimization and performance evaluation of several parts of the underlying infrastructures. However, field trials are challenging due to their operational costs, and in every case, the obtained results could be difficult to repeat and customize. These emergingMobile-Fog-Cloud ecosystems still lack, indeed, customizable software tools for the performance simulation of their computing-networking building blocks. Motivated by these considerations, in this contribution, we present VirtFogSim. It is aMATLAB-supported software toolbox that allows the dynamic joint optimization and tracking of the energy and delay performance of Mobile-Fog-Cloud systems for the execution of applications described by general Directed Application Graphs (DAGs). In a nutshell, the main peculiar features of the proposed VirtFogSim toolbox are that: (i) it allows the joint dynamic energy-aware optimization of the placement of the application tasks and the allocation of the needed computing-networking resources under hard constraints on acceptable overall execution times, (ii) it allows the repeatable and customizable simulation of the resulting energy-delay performance of the overall system; (iii) it allows the dynamic tracking of the performed resource allocation under time-varying operational environments, as those typically featuring mobile applications; (iv) it is equipped with a user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) that supports a number of graphic formats for data rendering, and (v) itsMATLAB code is optimized for running atop multi-core parallel execution platforms. To check both the actual optimization and scalability capabilities of the VirtFogSim toolbox, a number of experimental setups featuring different use cases and operational environments are simulated, and their performances are compared
A Distributed Approach to Interference Alignment in OFDM-based Two-tiered Networks
In this contribution, we consider a two-tiered network and focus on the
coexistence between the two tiers at physical layer. We target our efforts on a
long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) orthogonal frequency division multiple
access (OFDMA) macro-cell sharing the spectrum with a randomly deployed second
tier of small-cells. In such networks, high levels of co-channel interference
between the macro and small base stations (MBS/SBS) may largely limit the
potential spectral efficiency gains provided by the frequency reuse 1. To
address this issue, we propose a novel cognitive interference alignment based
scheme to protect the macro-cell from the cross-tier interference, while
mitigating the co-tier interference in the second tier. Remarkably, only local
channel state information (CSI) and autonomous operations are required in the
second tier, resulting in a completely self-organizing approach for the SBSs.
The optimal precoder that maximizes the spectral efficiency of the link between
each SBS and its served user equipment is found by means of a distributed
one-shot strategy. Numerical findings reveal non-negligible spectral efficiency
enhancements with respect to traditional time division multiple access
approaches at any signal to noise (SNR) regime. Additionally, the proposed
technique exhibits significant robustness to channel estimation errors,
achieving remarkable results for the imperfect CSI case and yielding consistent
performance enhancements to the network.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted and to appear in IEEE Transactions on
Vehicular Technology Special Section: Self-Organizing Radio Networks, 2013.
Authors' final version. Copyright transferred to IEE
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