Researchers: Ngok Lam, Ph.D. Student & Prof. Lorne Mason
Description:
The demand for end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS)
guarantees in the Internet has increased significantly due to the introduction of new applications like VoIP, online gaming, and video conferencing. This poses a major challenge to the current Internet architecture. Owing to historical reasons, the Internet consists of a large collection of independent Autonomous Systems (ASes). To ensure end-to-end QoS guarantees for the data, one has to build a multi-lateral business relationship with all the independent ASes his data transit. This makes it unrealistic to obtain end-to-end QoS guarantees. A higher level mechanism on the top of the Internet known as Service Overlay Network (SON) is thus proposed to alleviate this problem. Because of its special structure, the SON is able to delivery end-to-end QoS guarantees without the need of making fundamental changes to the current Internet Infrastructure.
Yet the SON network, just like many other networks in the telecommunications industry, exhibits network externalities. Which means the value of the SON network increases with the the number of consumers that are using it. For this kind of telecommication networks, a threshold network size (a.k.a "critical mass") is needed to be reached for the network to build up and to end in the equilibrium.
Once the threshold is reached the network will continue to grow in a self-reinforcing manner that eventually leads to the equilibrium state. Obviously the depolyment of a SON is a capital intensive investment.
By carefully designing the SON network, the SON operator will be able to provide the services at attractive prices, which is a key factor whether the consumers are likely to employ the SON service. And this is an extremely important factor for the SON network to reach its critical mass.
For consumers to consider SON, a certain degree of reliability is also needed. We study the economic design of a SON network under the reliability constraints. By using results from the reliability theory, we are able to derive interesting results for arbitrary routing schemes under the SON environment.The results are valid as long as the routing schemes satisfy certain monotonic conditions.
Publications:
N. Lam, Z. Dziong and L.G. Mason, Service Overlay Network Design with Reliability Constraints, in Proc. IEEE 7th International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks, Washington, D.C., USA, October 2009.
[Paper (pdf format)]
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