The Internet suffers from insufficient service quality to reliably support many real-time, high bitrate applications. This shortcoming is due in large part to users or providers not considering the effect their choices have on others ? in other words the resulting externalities. For example, users who download movies during the work day reduce the quality of the network for more time-critical applications; in a non-neutral network, individual ISPs may overcharge high-value applications if they do not consider the interactions of such charges across ISPs. Depending on the circumstances, the problem can be due to a combination of the following three effects: i) the technology of the network does not enable the user or provider to make better choices; ii) the network does not give the user or provider the information to make better choices; iii) the user or provider lacks an incentive to make better choices even if he can. This project will investigate how these effects impact service quality in the network. Using this analysis as a basis, remedies for these effects will be investigated. The remedies may include combinations of new protocols and technology, pricing mechanisms, and regulation ? including requirements and/or mechanisms for information disclosure.
Intellectual Merit: This project addresses fundamental scientific and engineering questions in networking. The scientific questions include suitable formulation and analysis of the strategic choices that the users, content providers, service providers, and other parties in the network face when they interact. The properties of the resulting equilibrium strategies and their distributed computation raise novel mathematical and algorithmic questions of broad relevance. Other fundamental scientific issues addressed include how to provide incentives for network evolution and for improved reliability. Engineering questions concern the scalability of the proposed algorithms and protocols, their security and robustness, how they can be deployed incrementally, and their extensibility as new technologies, services, and applications get implemented.
Broader Impact: The investigators expect that the work will contribute to a paradigm shift in the design of the future network. The focus on externalities, which is central to our project, has been largely unexplored and our preliminary investigations demonstrate its substantial importance. The investigations undertaken in the course of this project will suggest how network design should be modified to account for externalities and network informational imperfections. This project, with its focus on the intersection of the engineering and economic issues of network services, will offer ideal research experience to the project?s Ph.D. students. It is expected that the experiences and results from this project will greatly benefit the PI?s courses as well, in particular by making students aware of the inherent tradeoffs in engineering systems that function in a market context.
