This book presents Internet transport economics as a new approach to understanding the packet-switching paradigm of Internet infrastructure as a global transport system for data packets. It is a prescient view of the Internet's evolution into a content-centric service platform where the quality of services (QoS) cannot be guaranteed due to the tens of thousands of autonomous systems that enact business decisions on peering, routing, and pricing in a way that determines aspects of the Internet ecosystem like network topology, latency and throughput of traffic flows, and performance of network applications. The trafficking issues created in this environment are a critical concern and barrier for user applications that require real-time responses, such as telesurgery and teleoperation of autonomous vehicles, and the book presents the Internet transport economics model as the solution. While engineering and business are the prevailing lenses through which the Internet is viewed, the book builds its methodological framework around transport. Further delving into economics, it establishes how the Internet can be understood as providing transport services for data packets, whose demand and supply are driven by the QoS metrics of delay and loss, which can be regarded as congestion costs that result in equilibrium rates of traffic flows sent by content providers (CPs). The book goes on to present a stylized model of content provider-to-access provider (CPAP) service as well as congestion equilibrium and rate equilibrium solution concepts under the Internet transport economics framework. These are used to analyze the problem domains of service differentiation, market structure, and data pricing. Finally, it discusses various potential future applications. This book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in areas of computer networking and performance evaluation.

Provides a new perspective of the Internet from the economics of its transport system Describes a modelling and analytical framework for the macroscopic dynamics and evolution of the Internet Enables quantitative analyses of Quality of Service (QoS) of internet applications

Autorentext

Richard T. B. Ma received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in computer science and M.Phil. degree in computer science and engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 2010. During his Ph.D. study, he worked as a Research Intern at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA, and Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain. From 2010-2014, he worked as a Research Scientist at the Advanced Digital Science Center (ADSC), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA. He is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. His current research interests include distributed systems and network economics. He was a recipient of the Best Paper Award Runners-up from the ACM Mobihoc 2020 and a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award from the IEEE IC2E 2013, the IEEE ICNP 2014, and the IEEE Workshop on Smart Data Pricing 2015. He is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Inhalt
PART I: Methodological Framework.- 1. Viewpoints to the Internet.- 2. Economics Views of Internet Transport.- 3. Equilibrium Characterization.- 4. Related Works and Future Directions.- PART II: Application Problems.- 5. Model and Equilibrium.- 6. Service Differentiation.- 7. Market Structure.- 8. Data Pricing.- 9. Further Discussions.