Spot Transit: Cheaper Internet Transit for Elastic Traffic

Abstract

We advocate to create a spot Internet transit market, where transit is sold using the under-utilized backbone capacity at a lower price. The providers can improve profit by capitalizing the perishable capacity, and customers can buy transit on demand without a minimum commitment level for elastic traffic, and as a result improve their surplus (i.e., utility gains). We conduct a systematic study of the economical benefits of spot transit both theoretically and empirically. We propose a simple analytical framework with a general demand function, and solve the pricing problem to maximize the expected profit, taking into account the potential revenue loss of regular transit when spot transit traffic hikes. We prove the price advantage of spot transit, as well as the profit and surplus improvements for tier-1 ISPs and customers, respectively. Using real-world price data and traffic statistics of six IXPs with more than 1,000 ISPs, we evaluate spot transit and show that significant financial benefits can be achieved in both absolute and relative terms, robust to parameter values.