NUS CS COLLOQUIUM SERIES

Internet Transport Economics - a new approach to characterize the Quality of Service (QoS) of Internet services

Speaker
Richard T. B. Ma, Associate Professor, School of Computing
Contact Person
Dr Kuldeep S. MEEL, Associate Professor, School of Computing
meel@comp.nus.edu.sg

17 Nov 2021 Wednesday, 03:00 PM to 04:30 PM

via Zoom

Abstract:
With the rise of video streaming and cloud services, the Internet has evolved into a content-centric service platform. Due to the best-effort service model of the Internet, the quality of service (QoS) of Internet services however cannot be guaranteed. Furthermore, characterizing QoS is challenging since it depends on the autonomous business decisions such as capacity planning, routing strategies and peering agreements of network providers. To quantify the QoS for Internet-based services, we regard the Internet infrastructure as a transport system for data packets and study the Internet ecosystem and the economics of transport services collectively provided by the autonomous network providers. In contrast to the traditional transport economics that studies the movement of people and goods over space and time, our focus in the Internet transport economics is the movement of streams of data packets that create information services.

In particular, we model the supply of network capacities and demands of throughput driven by network protocols and establish a macroscopic network equilibrium under which both the end-to-end delays and drop rates of Internet routes can be derived. We show that this equilibrium solution always exists and its uniqueness can be guaranteed under various realistic scenarios. We analyze the impacts of user demands and resource capacities on the network equilibrium and provide implications of Netflix-Comcast type of peering on the QoS of users. We demonstrate that our framework can be used as a building block to understand the routing strategies under a Wardrop equilibrium and to enable further studies such as Internet peering and in-network caching.


Biodata:
Richard T. B. Ma received the B.Sc. (1st class Hons.) and M.Phil. degrees in computer science 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 interned at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, NY, USA, and Telefonica Research, Barcelona. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. His current research interests include cloud computing, 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 in the IEEE IC2E 2013, the IEEE ICNP 2014, and the IEEE Workshop on Smart Data Pricing 2015. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and IEEE.