Paper Info
Title
On Optimal Sizing of Tiered Network Services.
Abstract
We develop an economic model for networks offer- ing tiered services and we formulate the problem of selecting the service tiers from three perspectives: one that considers the users' interests only, one that considers only the service provider's interests, and one that considers both simultaneously, i.e., the interests of society as a whole. We also present dynamic programming algorithms that solve these problems optimally. Our work provides a theoretical framework for reasoning about Internet tiered services, as well as a practical toolset for network providers to develop customized menus of service offerings. I. INTRODUCTION Internet service providers have introduced several forms of a tiered service, in which users may select from a small set of service levels (tiers) which offer progressively higher bandwidth with a corresponding increase in price. The in- troduction of tiered service has important engineering (e.g., in terms of operation, control, and management) and finan- cial implications for the network provider. A continuous- rate network must be designed to accommodate any arbitrary rate of service requested by the users. In a tiered-service network, on the other hand, a wide range of core functions, including equipment configuration, traffic engineering, quality of service (QoS) support and service level agreements, billing, and customer support are simplified, enabling the providers to scale their operations to millions of customers. Currently, service tiers are either based on the bandwidth hierarchy of the underlying network infrastructure (e.g., DS-1, OC-3, etc.), or are determined in some ad-hoc manner (e.g., the ADSL tiers available from various providers). In (5) we developed a systematic framework for tiered-service networks by adopting the network operator's perspective. We have also demonstrated the benefits of tiered service for traffic engineering (6) and packet scheduling for QoS (7). In this paper, we extend our work in (5) by developing an economic model for tiered-service networks that allows us to formulate the problem of selecting the service tiers from three perspectives: one that considers the users' interests only, one that considers only the service provider's interests, and one that considers both simultaneously, i.e., the interests of society as a whole. We also present dynamic programming algorithms that solve these problems optimally. Our work provides a theoretical framework for reasoning about Internet tiered services, as well as a practical toolset for network providers to develop customized menus of service offerings that cater to user needs while ensuring that both parties are satisfied.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/INFOCOM.2008.245
INFOCOM
Keywords
Field
DocType
dynamic programming algorithm,service level,bandwidth,quality of service,computer science,economic model,optimization,satisfiability,dynamic programming,internet,economics
Dynamic programming,Tiered service,Economic model,Computer science,Network providers,Computer network,Quality of service,Service provider,Sizing,The Internet
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0743-166X
978-1-4244-2025-4
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
2
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qian Lv100.34
George N. Rouskas299088.88