Subsidization Competition: Vitalizing the Neutral Internet

Unlike telephone operators, which pay termination fees to reach the users of another network, Internet Content Providers (CPs) do not pay the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of users they reach. While the consequent cross subsidization to CPs has nurtured content innovations at the edge of the Internet, it reduces the investment incentives for the access ISPs to expand capacity. As potential charges for terminating CPs' traffic are criticized under the net neutrality debate, we propose to allow CPs to voluntarily subsidize the usagebased fees induced by their content traffic for end-users. We model the regulated subsidization competition among CPs under a neutral network and show how deregulation of subsidization could increase an access ISP's utilization and revenue, strengthening its investment incentives. Although the competition might harm certain CPs, we find that the main cause comes from high access prices rather than the existence of subsidization. Our results suggest that subsidization competition will increase the competitiveness and welfare of the Internet content market; however, regulators might need to regulate access prices if the access ISP market is not competitive enough. We envision that subsidization competition could become a viable model for the future Internet

Paid Peering, Settlement-Free Peering, or Both?

With the rapid growth of congestion-sensitive and data-intensive applications, traditional settlement-free peering agreements with best-effort delivery often do not meet the QoS requirements of content providers (CPs). Meanwhile, Internet access providers (IAPs) feel that revenues from end-users are not sufficient to recoup the upgrade costs of network infrastructures. Consequently, some IAPs have begun to offer CPs a new type of peering agreement, called paid peering, under which they provide CPs with better data delivery quality for a fee. In this paper, we model a network platform where an IAP makes decisions on the peering types offered to CPs and the prices charged to CPs and end-users. We study the optimal peering schemes for the IAP, i.e., to offer CPs both the paid and settlement-free peering to choose from or only one of them, as the objective is profit or welfare maximization. Our results show that 1) the IAP should always offer the paid and settlement-free peering under the profit-optimal and welfare-optimal schemes, respectively, 2) whether to simultaneously offer the other peering type is largely driven by the type of data traffic, e.g., text or video, and 3) regulators might want to encourage the IAP to allocate more network capacity to the settlement-free peering for increasing user welfare

On Optimal Service Differentiation in Congested Network Markets

As Internet applications have become more diverse in recent years, users having heavy demand for online video services are more willing to pay higher prices for better services than light users that mainly use e-mails and instant messages. This encourages the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to explore service differentiations so as to optimize their profits and allocation of network resources. Much prior work has focused on the viability of network service differentiation by comparing with the case of a single-class service. However, the optimal service differentiation for an ISP subject to resource constraints has remained unsolved. In this work, we establish an optimal control framework to derive the analytical solution to an ISP's optimal service differentiation, i.e. the optimal service qualities and associated prices. By analyzing the structures of the solution, we reveal how an ISP should adjust the service qualities and prices in order to meet varying capacity constraints and users' characteristics. We also obtain the conditions under which ISPs have strong incentives to implement service differentiation and whether regulators should encourage such practices

Sampling Online Social Networks via Heterogeneous Statistics

Most sampling techniques for online social networks (OSNs) are based on a particular sampling method on a single graph, which is referred to as a statistics. However, various realizing methods on different graphs could possibly be used in the same OSN, and they may lead to different sampling efficiencies, i.e., asymptotic variances. To utilize multiple statistics for accurate measurements, we formulate a mixture sampling problem, through which we construct a mixture unbiased estimator which minimizes asymptotic variance. Given fixed sampling budgets for different statistics, we derive the optimal weights to combine the individual estimators; given fixed total budget, we show that a greedy allocation towards the most efficient statistics is optimal. In practice, the sampling efficiencies of statistics can be quite different for various targets and are unknown before sampling. To solve this problem, we design a two-stage framework which adaptively spends a partial budget to test different statistics and allocates the remaining budget to the inferred best statistics. We show that our two-stage framework is a generalization of 1) randomly choosing a statistics and 2) evenly allocating the total budget among all available statistics, and our adaptive algorithm achieves higher efficiency than these benchmark strategies in theory and experiment

The Public Option: a Non-regulatory Alternative to Network Neutrality

Network neutrality and the role of regulation on the Internet have been heavily debated in recent times. Amongst the various definitions of network neutrality, we focus on the one which prohibits paid prioritization of content and we present an analytical treatment of the topic. We develop a model of the Internet ecosystem in terms of three primary players: consumers, ISPs and content providers. Our analysis looks at this issue from the point of view of the consumer, and we describe the desired state of the system as one which maximizes consumer surplus. By analyzing different scenarios of monopoly and competition, we obtain different conclusions on the desirability of regulation. We also introduce the notion of a Public Option ISP, an ISP that carries traffic in a network neutral manner. Our major findings are (i) in a monopolistic scenario, network neutral regulations benefit consumers; however, the introduction of a Public Option ISP is even better for consumers, as it aligns the interests of the monopolistic ISP with the consumer surplus and (ii) in an oligopolistic situation, the presence of a Public Option ISP is again preferable to network neutral regulations, although the presence of competing price-discriminating ISPs provides the most desirable situation for the consumers

DRS: Dynamic Resource Scheduling for Real-Time Analytics over Fast Streams

In a data stream management system (DSMS), users register continuous queries, and receive result updates as data arrive and expire. We focus on applications with real-time constraints, in which the user must receive each result update within a given period after the update occurs. To handle fast data, the DSMS is commonly placed on top of a cloud infrastructure. Because stream properties such as arrival rates can fluctuate unpredictably, cloud resources must be dynamically provisioned and scheduled accordingly to ensure real-time response. It is quite essential, for the existing systems or future developments, to possess the ability of scheduling resources dynamically according to the current workload, in order to avoid wasting resources, or failing in delivering correct results on time. Motivated by this, we propose DRS, a novel dynamic resource scheduler for cloud-based DSMSs. DRS overcomes three fundamental challenges: (a) how to model the relationship between the provisioned resources and query response time (b) where to best place resources; and (c) how to measure system load with minimal overhead. In particular, DRS includes an accurate performance model based on the theory of \emph{Jackson open queueing networks} and is capable of handling \emph{arbitrary} operator topologies, possibly with loops, splits and joins. Extensive experiments with real data confirm that DRS achieves real-time response with close to optimal resource consumption.Comment: This is the our latest version with certain modificatio