On the problem of revenue sharing in multi-domain federations

Part 5: Cooperation and CollaborationInternational audienceAutonomous System alliances or federations are envisioned to emerge in the near future as a means of selling end-to-end quality assured services through interdomain networks. This collaborative paradigm mainly responds to the ever increasing Internet traffic volumes that requires assured quality, and constitutes a new business opportunity for Network Service Providers (NSPs). However, current Internet business rules are not likely to satisfy all involved partners in this emerging scenario. How the revenue is shared among NSPs must be agreed in advance, and should enforce economical incentives to join an alliance and remain in it, so that the alliance remains stable. In this paper, we work on the scenario of such federations, where service selling is formulated as a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem. In this context, we formally formulate the properties the revenue sharing (RS) method should fulfill and argue why the existing methods are not suitable. Finally, we propose a family of solutions to the RS problem such that the economical stability and efficiency of the alliance in the long term is guaranteed. The proposed method is based on solving a series of Optimization Problems and considering statistics on the incomes

End-to-end resource management for federated delivery of multimedia services

Recently, the Internet has become a popular platform for the delivery of multimedia content. Currently, multimedia services are either offered by Over-the-top (OTT) providers or by access ISPs over a managed IP network. As OTT providers offer their content across the best-effort Internet, they cannot offer any Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to their users. On the other hand, users of managed multimedia services are limited to the relatively small selection of content offered by their own ISP. This article presents a framework that combines the advantages of both existing approaches, by dynamically setting up federations between the stakeholders involved in the content delivery process. Specifically, the framework provides an automated mechanism to set up end-to-end federations for QoS-aware delivery of multimedia content across the Internet. QoS contracts are automatically negotiated between the content provider, its customers, and the intermediary network domains. Additionally, a federated resource reservation algorithm is presented, which allows the framework to identify the optimal set of stakeholders and resources to include within a federation. Its goal is to minimize delivery costs for the content provider, while satisfying customer QoS requirements. Moreover, the presented framework allows intermediary storage sites to be included in these federations, supporting on-the-fly deployment of content caches along the delivery paths. The algorithm was thoroughly evaluated in order to validate our approach and assess the merits of including intermediary storage sites. The results clearly show the benefits of our method, with delivery cost reductions of up to 80 % in the evaluated scenario

An SLA-driven framework for dynamic multimedia content delivery federations

Recently, the Internet has become a popular platform for the delivery of multimedia content. However, its best effort delivery approach is ill-suited to guarantee the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of many existing multimedia services, which results in a significant reduction of the Quality of Experience. This paper presents a solution to these problems, in the form of a framework for dynamically setting up federations between the stakeholders involved in the content delivery chain. More specifically, the framework provides an automated mechanism to set up end-to-end delivery paths from the content provider to the access Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which act as its direct customers and represent a group of end-users. Driven by Service Level Agreements (SLAs), QoS contracts are automatically negotiated between the content provider, the access ISPs, and the intermediary network domains along the delivery paths. These contracts capture the delivered QoS and resource reservation costs, which are subsequently used in the price negotiations between content provider and access ISPs. Additionally, it supports the inclusion of cloud providers within the federations, supporting on-the-fly allocation of computational and storage resources. This allows the automatic deployment and configuration of proxy caches along the delivery paths, which potentially reduce delivery costs and increase delivered quality

The efficacy of federalism in a multi-ethnic state: the Nigerian experience

The continuing debate among social and political commentators over the utility of federalism in a multi-ethnic federation like Nigeria, as well as the unending clamour in some parts of the country for the dissolution of the federal union, make the writing of this article not only timely, but also a worthwhile exercise. The paper, which adopts a historical and descriptive method of analysis, is therefore an attempt to join the discourse on the efficacy of federalism in Nigeria by arguing that the geo-demographic complexity of the Nigerian state and society makes federalism the most appropriate political framework for the country. This is not suggesting that the federal system of government constitutes a panacea to the country’s hydra-headed multiplicity. There is no denying that the system is not working the way it ought to in its current incarnation, but it has lived up to the expectation of the country’s founding fathers in ‘holding together’ the diverse ethnic groups in the country as well as in achieving ‘unity in diversity’. Therefore, our suggestion is that Nigerian political leaders should improve upon the current system and redress the inherent imbalances that have become its features, because history suggests that federalism is Nigeria’s best obtainable option

Use of socio-economic criteria for intergovernmental transfers: The case of India.

Intergovernmental fiscal relations