The Market Enabling Network Architecture project is funded by the NSF
Future Internet Design (FIND) program. The project is collaborative between UC
Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. Our objective is to study how the future
Internet can be designed to enable markets for service quality and
security.
What follows is a survey of some of the research questions we are
studying.
Service
Choice:
Today, service quality is often not dependable enough for critical real
time applications. Even if one is willing to pay more for better
service, today’s network makes it difficult or impossible to
do.
Idea: Users offered real-time choice: “red” and
“blue”
· “red” and
“blue” not specified to users in detail;
“red” and “blue”
not specified to users in detail;
Users decide based on which they think gives better
performance.
Market will push providers to make improvements,
and offer services more suitable for intensive real-time applications.
No need to dictate QoS parameters a
“standard.” Let the market decide!
Network
Neutrality: One key
question of the network neutrality debate is whether ISPs should be
allowed to charge content providers that are not directly connected to
them. Issues and questions that arise include:
Would allowing ISP 2 to charge Content Provider A encourage
2 to invest more? Would it discourage content providers investment?
Which regime is better for users?
What features (if any) should new Internet have to enable
revenue sharing between content and transit providers?
The Internet is composed of
many network providers, each of which is trying to selfishly maximize
their profit. Furthermore, users are also making usage decisions and
choosing their ISP based on what maximizes their net payoff -- the
utility they derive from the network minus what they have to pay to the
network provider. The interactions between network providers and users
can be thought of as a game, and using this framework we can
investigate how efficient the likely outcomes of this game are. Such an
understanding is vital to developing new network architectures that may
change the structure of the interaction between the players of the
game, and therefore the efficiency of the likely outcome(s) of the
game. The following works investigate various aspects of these issues.
J. Musacchio, "The Price of Anarchy in Parallel - Serial Competition
with Elastic Demand,'' UCSC SOE Tech Report UCSC-SOE-09-20. (2009)
J. Musacchio, G. Schwartz, and J. Walrand, ``Network
Economics: Neutrality, Competition, and Service Differentiation,''
book chapter, to appear in Next-Generation
Internet Architectures and Protocols, edited by B.
Ramamurthy, G. Rouskas, and K. Sivalingam, Cambridge
University Press. (2009)
