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The
Internet’s simple best-effort packet-switched architecture lies at the core of
its tremendous success and impact. However, current Internet architecture
allows neither (i) users to indicate their value choices at sufficient
granularity nor (ii) providers to manage risks
involved in investment for new innovative QoS
technologies and business relationships with other providers as well as
users. To allow these flexibilities, this project investigates
“contract-switching” as a new paradigm for future Internet. Just like
packet-switching enabled flexible and efficient multiplexing of data in the
Internet, a contract-switched network will enable flexible and economically
efficient management of risks and value flows.
This
project focuses on the design of a contract-switching framework in the
context of multi-domain QoS contracts. It addresses
the challenges involved in the development of decentralized inter-domain
protocol mechanisms that can dynamically compose and price complex end-to-end
contracts. The project formulates this end-to-end contract composition as a
“contract routing” problem, resembling the QoS
routing algorithms. This research also develops an appropriate abstraction
necessary for pricing of QoS contracts, dynamically
composable contracts in space and time. The project
employs financial engineering techniques to provide risk sharing mechanisms
and money-back guarantee structures for the QoS
contracts. This research brings together network architecture design and
financial engineering tools. This interdisciplinary work can inspire usage of
economic tools for security problems like spam and DDoS
attacks. The project will be especially beneficial to the Internet policy
makers.
- W. Liu, H. T. Karaoglu, A. Gupta, M.
Yuksel, and K. Kar, Edge-to-Edge
Bailout Forward Contracts for Single-Domain Internet Services, Proceedings of IEEE International
Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS),
pages 259-268, Enschede, Netherlands, June
2008. (slides)
Abstract: Despite the huge
success of the Internet in providing basic communication services, the
Internet architecture needs to be upgraded so as to provide end-to-end QoS services to its customers. Currently, a user or
an enterprise that needs end-to-end bandwidth guarantees between two
arbitrary points in the Internet for a short period of time has no way
of expressing its needs. To allow these much needed basic QoS services we propose a single-domain edge-to-edge
(g2g) dynamic capacity contracting mechanism, where a network customer
can enter into a bandwidth contract on a g2g path at a future time, at a
predetermined price. For practical and economic viability, such forward
contracts must involve a bailout option to account for bandwidth
becoming unavailable at service delivery time, and must be priced
appropriately to enable ISPs manage risks in their contracting and
investments. Our design allows ISPs to advertise point-to-point
different prices for each of their g2g paths instead of the current
point-to-anywhere prices, allowing for better end-to-end paths, temporal
flexibility and efficiency of bandwidth usage. We compute the
risk-neutral prices for these g2g bailout forward contracts (BFCs), taking into account correlations between
different contracts due to correlated demand patterns and overlapping
paths. We implement this multiple g2g BFC framework on a realistic
network model with Rocketfuel topologies, and
evaluate our contract switching mechanism in terms of key network
performance metrics like fraction of bailouts, revenue earned by the
provider, and adaptability to link failures.
- M. Yuksel, K. K. Ramakrishnan, S. Kalyanaraman, J. D. Houle,
and R. Sadhvani, Class-of-Service
in IP Backbones: Informing the Network Neutrality Debate,
(short paper) Proceedings of ACM
International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
(SIGMETRICS), pages 465-466, Annapolis,
MD, June 2008. (poster)
Abstract: The benefit of
Class-of-Service (CoS) is a heated topic in
the “Network Neutrality” debate. Proponents of network neutrality
suggest that over-provisioning is a viable alternative to CoS. We quantify the
extra capacity requirement for an over-provisioned classless (i.e.,
best-effort) network compared to a CoS network providing the same delay or
loss performance for premium traffic. We first develop a link model that
quantifies this Required Extra
Capacity (REC). To illustrate key parameters involved in
analytically quantifying REC, we start with simple traffic distributions
when delay or loss probability is the performance goal. Then, for more bursty and realistic traffic distributions (e.g.,
long-range dependent), we find the REC using ns-2 simulations of the CoS and classless link
cases. Our primary contribution is in using these link models to
quantify the REC for realistic network topologies (obtained from Rocketfuel) under various scenarios including link
and node failures. We show that REC can be significant even when the
proportion of premium traffic is small, a situation often considered
benign for the over-provisioning alternative. We also show that the
impact of CoS
on best-effort traffic is relatively small while still providing the
desired performance for premium traffic.
- M. Yuksel, A. Gupta, and S. Kalyanaraman,
Contract-Switching
Paradigm for Internet Value Flows and Risk Management, Proceedings of IEEE Global Internet
Symposium, Phoenix, AZ, April 2008. (slides)
Abstract: The Internet’s simple design resulted in huge success in
basic telecommunication services. However, in terms of providing
end-to-end QoS services, the Internet’s
architecture needs major shifts since it neither allows (i) users to indicate their value choices at
sufficient granularity nor (ii) providers to manage risks involved in
investment for new innovative QoS technologies
and business relationships with other providers as well as users.
Currently, users can only indicate their value choices at the
access/link bandwidth level not at the routing level. Similarly, an
enterprise that needs end-to-end capacity contracts between two
arbitrary points on the Internet for a short period of time has no way
of expressing its needs. To allow these much needed economic
flexibilities, we introduce contract-switching
as a new paradigm for the design of future Internet architecture. Just
like packet-switching enabled flexible and efficient multiplexing of
data, a contract-switched inter-network will enable flexible and
economically efficient management of risks and value flows with many
more tussle points.
This
project is supported by National Science Foundation award 0721600
and 0721609.
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