Thirty years of networking research on Quality of Service (QoS) has resulted in standards that have been incorporated into routers of all shapes and sizes. And yet, despite all of this work, use of QoS is very limited. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have implemented QoS to support their own voice and video services, but do not offer QoS to their subscribers for use by any other Internet applications. ISPs have not incorporated QoS into their interconnection agreements, and hence end-to-end QoS is not available. The limited deployment of QoS has ignited vigorous debate over Net Neutrality, which has become the most contentious telecommunications public policy issue in decades.

End-to-end QoS deployment requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates network architecture, economics, and law. Internet architecture has not adequately considered the economic motivations of ISPs; QoS will be deployed and used only when there is a business case for it. The network economics literature has only modeled network access, not QoS. Law will dictate what ISPs can do; it may make QoS illegal, may allow QoS but prohibit charging for it, or may allow ISPs to not offer QoS to competitors. This project will address the lack of QoS availability to applications, the lack of availability of end-toend QoS, and the effects of possible net neutrality laws.

The project is in early stages. The initial work is focused on how Internet Service Providers design tier rates, tier prices, and network capacity. Web browsing and video streaming are considered as the two dominant Internet applications. We propose a novel set of utility functions that depend on a user’s willingness to pay for each application, the performance of each application, and the time devoted to each application. For a monopoly provider, the demand function for each tier is derived as a function of tier price and performance. We first give conditions for the tier rates, tier prices, and network capacity that maximize Internet Service Provider profit, defined as subscription revenue minus capacity cost. We then show how an Internet Service Provider may simplify tier and capacity design, by allowing their engineering department to set network capacity, their marketing department to set tier prices, and both to jointly set tier rates.

Modeling ISP Tier Design (with W. Dai), Interational Teletraffic Congress, September 2013.

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