Why Value is Everything: A User-Centered Approach to Internet Quality of Service and Pricing

To create acceptable levels of Quality of Service (QoS), designers need to be able to predict users' behaviour in response to different levels of QoS. However, predicting behaviour requires an understanding of users' requirements for specific tasks and contexts. This paper reports qualitative and experimental research that demonstrates that future network service must be based on an old principle: service and its associate cost must represent value in terms of the contribution it makes to customers' goals. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) methods can be applied to identify users' goals and associated QoS requirements. Firstly, we used a qualitative approach to establish the mental concepts that users apply when assessing network services and charges

Managing bandwidth in multimedia applications using a market-based middleware

This paper presents an application-layer middleware that applies a microeconomic model to help multimedia applications utilize available bandwidth in a way that maximizes the user’s net benefit. The key components are a bandwidth broker that puts the supply of available bandwidth on a virtual market residing inside the application, and utility functions for each media, which are used to calculate their relative gain to the user at each bandwidth level. Basic supply and demand principles are used where the broker raises a virtual price if the total demand from all media exceeds the available supply, or lowers the price if demand is lower than the available supply. The advantage of the middleware is that it allows problems related to network management (usually affecting the supply) and human computer interaction (usually affecting demand) to be researched and integrated separately into an application and combined to leverage bandwidth in the best possible way. As a proof of concept, a prototype has been built by integrating the middleware into Marratech Pro, a commercially available e-meeting application. The paper presents experimental results using this prototypeValiderad; 2005; 20060916 (ysko

The role of compatibility in the diffusion of technologies through social networks

In many settings, competing technologies -- for example, operating systems, instant messenger systems, or document formats -- can be seen adopting a limited amount of compatibility with one another; in other words, the difficulty in using multiple technologies is balanced somewhere between the two extremes of impossibility and effortless interoperability. There are a range of reasons why this phenomenon occurs, many of which -- based on legal, social, or business considerations -- seem to defy concise mathematical models. Despite this, we show that the advantages of limited compatibility can arise in a very simple model of diffusion in social networks, thus offering a basic explanation for this phenomenon in purely strategic terms. Our approach builds on work on the diffusion of innovations in the economics literature, which seeks to model how a new technology A might spread through a social network of individuals who are currently users of technology B. We consider several ways of capturing the compatibility of A and B, focusing primarily on a model in which users can choose to adopt A, adopt B, or -- at an extra cost -- adopt both A and B. We characterize how the ability of A to spread depends on both its quality relative to B, and also this additional cost of adopting both, and find some surprising non-monotonicity properties in the dependence on these parameters: in some cases, for one technology to survive the introduction of another, the cost of adopting both technologies must be balanced within a narrow, intermediate range. We also extend the framework to the case of multiple technologies, where we find that a simple model captures the phenomenon of two firms adopting a limited "strategic alliance" to defend against a new, third technology

Minimum Regret Approach to Network Management under Uncertainty with Applications to Connection Admission Control and Routing

This paper proposes a framework for network management in-tended to balance network performance under normal steady operational con-ditions with robustness under non-steady, and/or adverse conditions. Work-ing in conjunction with anomaly and/or intrusion detection, the proposed framework allows the network to develop a set of measured responses to pos-sible anomalies and external threats by minimizing the average maximum network losses, i.e., regrets or risks, due to uncertainty. Loss maximization guards against uncertainty within each scenario. Averaging of the maximum losses reflects any available information on the likelihood of different sce-narios. The proposed framework includes Bayesian and minimax approaches as particular cases. The paper demonstrates how the proposed framework can alleviate high sensitivity of a cost-based admission and routing scheme to u n-certain resource costs and possible presence of excessive and/or adversarial traffic. Specific examples include competitive and minimum interference admission and routing schemes.

Private peering, transit and traffic diversion

Private peering refers to settlement-free connectivity agreements between Internet Service Providers meant to interconnect their networks by-passing congested National Access Points. We explore the incentives for bilateral peering with particular emphasis on traffic diversion. A private peering agreement between two providers improves the quality of both and would divert traffic from third parties. This provides an incentive for peering. A three-player model is introduced and analyzed. Complication introduced by price competition and heterogeneous consumers are also studied. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005peering, transit, internet service providers, C7, L14,