Economic Policy Analysis and the Internet: Coming to Terms with a Telecommunications Anomaly

The significant set of public policy issues for economic analysis that arise from the tensions between the ‘special benefits’ of the Internet as a platform for innovation, and the drawbacks of the “anomalous” features of the Internet viewed as simply one among the array of telecommunications systems, is the focus of discussion in this chapter. Economists concerned with industrial organization and regulation (including antitrust and merger law) initially found new scope for application of their expertise in conventional policy analyses of the Internet’s interactions with other segments of the telecommunications sector (broadcast and cable television, radio and telephone), and emphasized the potential congestion problems posed by user anonymity and flat rate pricing. Policy issues of a more dynamic kind have subsequently come to the fore. These involve classic tradeoffs between greater efficiency and producer and consumer surpluses today, and a potential for more innovation in Web-based products and service in the future. Many such tradeoffs involve choices such as that between policies that would preserve the original ‘end-to-end’ design of the original Internet architecture, and those that would be more encouraging of market-driven deployment of new technologies that afforded ISPs with greater market power the opportunity to offer (and extract greater profits from) restricted-Web services that consumers valued highly, such as secure and private VOIP.public policy, telecommunications, Web-based products, user anonymity

Dynamic bandwidth allocation with SLA awareness for QoS in ethernet passive optical networks

Quality-of-service (QoS) support in Ethernet passive optical networks is a crucial concern. We propose a new dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithm for service differentiation that meets the service-level agreements (SLAs) of the users. The proposed delay-aware (DA) online DBA algorithm provides constant and predictable average packet delay and reduced delay variation for the high-and medium-priority traffic while keeping the packet loss rate under check. We prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by exhaustive simulations

Multi-Terabit/s IP Switching with Guaranteed Service for Streaming Traffic

traffic on the Internet continues to grow exponentially, there is a real need to solve transmission and switching scalability. Moreover, future Internet traffic will be dominated by streaming media flows, such as video-telephony, video-conferencing, 3D video, virtual reality, and many more. Consequently, network solutions will need to offer quality of service and traffic engineering together with the above mentioned scalability - i.e., over-provisioning is not likely be a viable solution to accommodate streaming media traffic. This paper describes the architecture of a ultra-scalable IP switch and the first experiments with a prototypal implementation. The switch scalability is a consequence of it operating pipeline forwarding of packets, which also results in quality of service guarantees for UDP-based streaming applications, while preserving elastic TCP-based traffic as is, i.e., without affecting any existing applications based on "best- effort" services. Moreover, the prototype demonstrates the low complexity of pipeline forwarding implementation as the deployed network gear was realized from off-the-shelf components in only nine months through the design, implementation, and testing efforts of the authors

Design issues for the Generic Stream Encapsulation (GSE) of IP datagrams over DVB-S2

The DVB-S2 standard has brought an unprecedented degree of novelty and flexibility in the way IP datagrams or other network level packets can be transmitted over DVB satellite links, with the introduction of an IP-friendly link layer - he continuous Generic Streams - and the adaptive combination of advanced error coding, modulation and spectrum management techniques. Recently approved by the DVB, the Generic Stream Encapsulation (GSE) used for carrying IP datagrams over DVBS2 implements solutions stemmed from a design rationale quite different from the one behind IP encapsulation schemes over its predecessor DVB-S. This paper highlights GSE's original design choices under the perspective of DVB-S2's innovative features and possibilities

Expressing application and network adaptivity : time variations and adaptation paths

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-48).Existing wireless networks provide a wide variety of service capabilities. Due to the inherent nature of wireless transmissions, these services are often characterized by high error rates, variable bandwidths and delays, and unpredictable interruptions. Users and applications are somewhat adaptive in their ability to handle these variable service conditions. However applications are not completely flexible nor does the user perceived quality vary in uniform fashion with the changes in network service. By characterizing flexibility, network service variations and application behaviors can be correlated to improve the QoS provided. To this end, this thesis argues that two new concepts, adaptation paths and time constraints, are important. Adaptation paths specify the ways in which network services and traffic can or do change with time. Time constraints capture aspects of QoS requirements related to time. In particular, two time constraints are introduced. First, a Discernible Service Time (DST) captures the duration for which a level of service must or will be provided before it is changed. Second, Interrupt Time (IT) captures durations for which a particular service may be interrupted for whatever reason. To demonstrate the utility of theses constructs this thesis provides a number of examples for how these extensions can be employed in wireless networks to improve QoS.by Steven J. Bauer.S.M

General QoS-Aware Scheduling Procedure for Passive Optical Networks

Increasing volume, dynamism, and diversity of access traffic have complicated the challenging problem of dynamic resource allocation in passive optical networks. We introduce a general scheduling procedure for passive optical networks, which optimizes a desired performance metric for an arbitrary set of operational constraints. The proposed scheduling has a fast and causal iterative implementation, where each iteration involves a local optimization problem followed by a recursive update of some status information. The generality of the platform enables a proper description of the diverse quality of service requirements, while its low computational complexity makes agile tracking of the network dynamism possible. To demonstrate its versatility and generality, the applications of the scheme for service-differentiated dynamic bandwidth allocation in time- and wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical networks are discussed. To further reduce the computational complexity, a closed-form solution of the involved optimization in each iteration of the scheduling is derived. We directly incorporate transmission delay in the scheduling and show how the consumed power is traded for the tolerable amount of transmission delay. Furthermore, a 50% power efficiency improvement is reported by exploiting the inherent service diversity among subscribers. The impact of service prioritization, finite buffer length, and packet drops on the power efficiency of the scheme are also investigated

Capacity Requirements of Traffic Handling Schemes in Multi-Service Networks

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This paper deals with the impact of traffic handling mechanisms on capacity for different network architectures. Three traffic handling models are considered: per-flow, class-based and best-effort (BE). These models can be used to meet service guarantees, the major differences being in their complexity of implementations and in the quantity of network resources that must be provided. In this study, the performance is fixed and the required capacity determined for various combinations of traffic handling architectures for edge-core networks. This study provides a comparison of different QoS architectures. One key result of this work is that on the basis of capacity requirements, there is no significant difference between semi-aggregate traffic handling and per-flow traffic handling. However, best-effort handling requires significantly more capacity as compared to the other methods. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserve