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.
Intellectual Merit: 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.
Broader Impact: 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. Management of risks with economic efficiency tools and financial derivatives has several areas of impact such as water, electricity, insurance, real-options analysis, investment under uncertainty, and understanding the impact of open-source technologies.
