Internet Transport Economics

This book presents internet transport economics as a new approach to understanding both the packet-switching paradigm of internet infrastructure as well as the global transport system for data packets. This 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. This approach determines various aspects of the internet ecosystem such as 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, including telesurgery and teleoperation of autonomous vehicles. This book presents the internet transport economics model as the solution. While engineering andbusiness are the prevailing lenses through which the internet is viewed, the author builds its methodological framework around transport. Further delving into economics, the book 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. The book proceeds to present a stylized model of content provider-to-access provider (CP–AP) 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, the author discusses various potential future applications. This book is appropriate for graduate students and researchers in the areas of computer networking and performance evaluation. In addition, this book: • Provides a new perspective of theInternet from the economics of its transport system• Describes a modeling and analytical framework for the macroscopic dynamics and evolution of the internet• Enables quantitative analyses of the Quality of Service (QoS) of internet applications