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

Communication-efficient Distributed Multi-resource Allocation

In several smart city applications, multiple resources must be allocated among competing agents that are coupled through such shared resources and are constrained --- either through limitations of communication infrastructure or privacy considerations. We propose a distributed algorithm to solve such distributed multi-resource allocation problems with no direct inter-agent communication. We do so by extending a recently introduced additive-increase multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) algorithm, which only uses very little communication between the system and agents. Namely, a control unit broadcasts a one-bit signal to agents whenever one of the allocated resources exceeds capacity. Agents then respond to this signal in a probabilistic manner. In the proposed algorithm, each agent makes decision of its resource demand locally and an agent is unaware of the resource allocation of other agents. In empirical results, we observe that the average allocations converge over time to optimal allocations.Comment: To appear in IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2018), Kansas City, USA, September, 2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1711.0197

Application-Oriented Flow Control: Fundamentals, Algorithms and Fairness

This paper is concerned with flow control and resource allocation problems in computer networks in which real-time applications may have hard quality of service (QoS) requirements. Recent optimal flow control approaches are unable to deal with these problems since QoS utility functions generally do not satisfy the strict concavity condition in real-time applications. For elastic traffic, we show that bandwidth allocations using the existing optimal flow control strategy can be quite unfair. If we consider different QoS requirements among network users, it may be undesirable to allocate bandwidth simply according to the traditional max-min fairness or proportional fairness. Instead, a network should have the ability to allocate bandwidth resources to various users, addressing their real utility requirements. For these reasons, this paper proposes a new distributed flow control algorithm for multiservice networks, where the application's utility is only assumed to be continuously increasing over the available bandwidth. In this, we show that the algorithm converges, and that at convergence, the utility achieved by each application is well balanced in a proportionally (or max-min) fair manner

CSMA Local Area Networking under Dynamic Altruism

In this paper, we consider medium access control of local area networks (LANs) under limited-information conditions as befits a distributed system. Rather than assuming "by rule" conformance to a protocol designed to regulate packet-flow rates (e.g., CSMA windowing), we begin with a non-cooperative game framework and build a dynamic altruism term into the net utility. The effects of altruism are analyzed at Nash equilibrium for both the ALOHA and CSMA frameworks in the quasistationary (fictitious play) regime. We consider either power or throughput based costs of networking, and the cases of identical or heterogeneous (independent) users/players. In a numerical study we consider diverse players, and we see that the effects of altruism for similar players can be beneficial in the presence of significant congestion, but excessive altruism may lead to underuse of the channel when demand is low

Analysing road pricing implementation processes in the UK and Norway

Traditional transport policies of road expansion entail a relatively simple system of actors and processes around which expertise, knowledge, and skills which has built up over many decades. Some of the more radical Travel Demand Management measures, including urban road pricing, involve a complicated set of institutions, processes, people and procedures. Road pricing schemes often get delayed or abandoned due to controversy, disagreements, unanticipated problems and a whole host of other delaying factors. If they are implemented, they tend to be diluted and consequently become less effective. Strategic Niche Management (SNM) has previously been used to provide guidelines on the implementation of innovative transport technologies through setting up protected experimental settings (niches) in which actors learn about the design, user needs, social and political acceptability, and other aspects. Here SNM is modified to cover a policy approach through the analysis of road user charging case studies in the UK and Norway. A detailed analysis of the road user charging schemes in Bergen, Oslo, Durham and London is presented. Key factors identified include the role of stakeholder and user networks, the existence of a project champion, understanding the motivations and expectations of stakeholders and users, learning with regards to the regional context, and the change in perceptions associated with acceptance. Comparison between the four cases shows different approaches emerging from each country in implementing and ‘marketing’ of the policies. The paper concentrates on approaches such as: the purpose for introducing the policies, the involvement of users in the planning process and, the use of revenues for either providing alternative transport modes or financing road infrastructure. Key factors identified using the SNM framework include the role of stakeholder and user networks, the existence of a project champion, understanding the motivations and expectations of stakeholders and users, learning with regards to the regional context, and the change in perceptions associated with acceptance. This type of analysis could prove useful for transport planners envisaging the implementation of road pricing projects