Traffic Exchange Research Articles

BILATERAL MARKET STRUCTURES AND REGULATORY POLICIES IN INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE MARKETS

We develop models of bilateral oligopoly with traffic exchanges to study the competition and regulatory policies in the international telephone markets. Under the requirement of uniform settlement rates, the proportional return rule (PRR) inflates the rates and hence neutralizes PRR's effect on calling prices. Retail competition and PRR increase net settlement payments. Market efficiency is improved when there are multiple channels for traffic exchanges. Using a panel of 47 countries that exchanged traffic with the United States between 1992 and 2004, we test the effects of bilateral market structures and the U.S. policies. The empirical results support our theoretical findings.

An Analysis of the Largest National Ecosystem of Public Internet eXchange Points: The Case of Brazil

Internet eXchange Points~(IXP) IXPs have become an increasing research target when aiming at understanding the complex and evolving Internet ecosystem. IXPs are shared infrastructures where Autonomous Systems~(AS) implement peering agreements for their traffic exchange and thus represent an interesting microcosm of the Internet diversity and a strategic vantage point to deliver end-user services. In this article, we provided an in-depth analysis of the largest set of public IXPs in a single country, namely the case of Brazil. The Brazilian public peering ecosystem counts with over 25 IXPs maintained by an overarching project called IX.br following a non-profit business model that facilitates multilateral agreements. The nation-wide peering initiative provides an appealing environment for innovation and fostering IP connectivity market practices. Without IX.br, access providers are limited in terms of coverage, performance, cost, and dependence on transit providers. The open and incentive-rich IXP approach can be regarded as an interesting development that may inspire other development countries as well as more established regional markets. Based on BGP data from all looking glass servers in IX.br, we provide insights into the peering ecosystem per IXP and from a nation-wide perspective by inspecting properties of the connectivity graphs and the IPv4 and IPv6 prefix distribution. We propose peering affinity as a metric well-suited to measure the connectivity between different types of ASes and overall found lower peering density in IX.br when compared to more mature ecosystems, such as AMS-IX, DE-CIX, LINX, and MSK-IX. When dissecting AS-level graphs we also observe the formation of IXP-enabled k-clique communities. Our final contribution is sharing the 11 GB dataset and supporting code to enable new research studies by the community.

Convergence in action: A case study of the Norwegian Internet

The conceptual framework for understanding the logical Internet is based on the construction of a horizontal, layered architecture, which differentiates between physical-, data link-, network-, transport-, and application layers (Woodard and Baldwin, 2008). This is different from the telecommunication networks model where a new service traditionally used to require new network architecture to be established (Yoo, 2012). However, the digitalization of services and products offered over the telecom infrastructure allows us to observe an emergent phenomenon of increased vertical integration on the Internet as well as the creation of further service specialization opportunities for telecom operators and users (Liebenau et al., 2011). We propose in this paper that this development and change in the way services are provided, leads to a new type of Internet – an addition to the current best effort Internet.We illustrate our proposition by presenting the case study of the Internet in Norway, analysing 166 of the approximately 40.000 independent AS numbers registered worldwide as catering for end-to-end services. The paper categorizes the Norwegian AS numbers according to size and type of services. Through our analyses two major groups of actors can be identified, each of them seeking to gain strategic advantage from the current Internet traffic growth:(1) Content providers and hosts seek to have a highly reliable network access with a minimal set of traffic or transmission costs. One action is to acquire AS numbers and use settlement-free peering agreements for distribution of their traffic, which is possible in traffic exchange regimes rooted in symmetry, slowly becoming asymmetric;(2) Internet access providers (IAPs) seek to take control over incoming traffic growth by hosting content within their own network and thereby to rebalance traffic and create new revenue streams with content hosting and premium end-to-end connection on-net. Our findings support the hypothesis that Internet is becoming both more vertically integrated and converged, and more specialized or modularized (Clark et al., 2004).

Analyzing Impact of Introducing CCN on Profit of ISPs

Content centric networking (CCN) has attracted a great deal of attention as a network that can efficiently deliver content. In CCN, content is delivered using the content name, instead of the host IP address, from cache memory implemented at routers. The nodes sending content are not explicitly indicated, and content is delivered from routers that have copies of content on the routes where the Interest packets are transmitted. Therefore, as a result of introducing CCN in ISP networks, the pattern of traffic exchanges among ISPs will change considerably. Customer ISPs normally pay a transit fee to transit ISPs based on the traffic volume transmitted on the transit links. Therefore, the introduction of CCN by ISPs will affect the profit of ISPs. CCN is introduced and operated by ISPs based on their business judgment, so it is im portant to estimate how CCN affects ISP profit to investigate the likelihood of CCN spreading among many ISPs. In this paper, we formalize the profit of ISPs when implementing CCN, assuming a hierarchical topology of ISPs in three levels and show that introducing CCN increases the profit of layer 2 and 3 ISPs, whereas introducing CCN decreases the profit of layer 1 ISPs. We also clarify that the effect of introducing CCN for the profit of ISPs is more remarkable as the cache capacity or the bias of content popularity increases.

Facing the traffic explosion in metro transport networks with energy-sustainable architectures

The continuous growth of traffic volumes is making the consumed energy, in telecommunication networks, a critical issue. In this context, the implementation of new content distribution solutions will speed up this traffic increase. In particular, these solutions will significantly impact the traffic profile in metro networks. The current centralized traffic scenario will move toward a scenario in which the traffic exchanges would be distributed among all the nodes of the metro network. In this work, starting from a real traffic scenario, we estimate a possible traffic evolution, and we design the metro networks, according to different architectures, using integer linear programming formulations. The aim was to understand which architecture can better face the considered traffic evolution. The comparison is performed considering the energy consumption, the network setup and management, and the quality of service ensured by the architectures.

Optical Slot Switching Latency in Mobile Backhaul Networks

Next generation mobile networks such as LTE-Advanced will offer high data rates to users utilizing new radio access technologies. In addition, new applications as well as devices such as smartphones and tablets will result in a rapid mobile traffic growth. Consequently, a rapid increase of the load in the mobile backhaul segment is expected, resulting in turn into a substantial increase of the energy consumption. Moreover, by allowing the possibility of direct communications between base stations for instance to support interference cancellation mechanisms such as “CoMP” and expedite handovers, the traffic pattern turns into any-to-any node communication in the next generation mobile networks. In previous papers, we proposed an optical mobile backhaul network to transport the mobile user data in an energy-efficient fashion while supporting any-to-any traffic exchanges. In this paper, we evaluate, analytically and by simulation, the latency in such next-generation optical mobile backhaul networks for realistic scenarios. We also study the impact of the support of several classes of service.

Network neutrality debate and ISP inter-relations: traffic exchange, revenue sharing, and disconnection threat

The network neutrality debate originally stems from the growing traffic asymmetry between ISPs, questioning the established peering or transit agreements. That tendency is due to popular content providers connected to the network through a single ISP whose traffic is not charged by distant ISPs. We propose in this paper to review the economic transit agreements between ISPs in order to determine their best strategy. We define a model with two ISPs, each providing direct connectivity to a fixed proportion of the content and competing in terms of price for end users, who select their ISP based on the price per unit of available content. We analyze and compare thanks to game-theoretic tools three different situations: the case of peering between the ISPs, the case where ISPs do not share their traffic (exclusivity arrangements), and the case where they fix a transfer price per unit of volume. Our results suggest that a minimal regulation, consisting in letting ISPs choose transit prices but imposing peering in case no agreement is reached, leads to satisfying outcomes in terms of user welfare while still leaving some decision space to ISPs, hence answering a concern they have regarding regulation in the Internet market.

Interconnection and Traffic Exchange on the Internet

Interconnection and Traffic Exchange on the Internet

Bilateral Market Structures and Regulatory Policies in International Telephone Markets

We develop models of bilateral oligopoly with two-way traffic exchanges to study the impact of competition and government regulatory policies on the international telephone markets. When carriers in each country are required to act collectively in setting a uniform settlement rate for inbound traffic, the proportional return rule (PRR) inflates equilibrium settlement rates and neutralizes equilibrium calling prices, although a direct effect of the PRR is to lower domestic calling prices for fixed settlement rates. Both competition and the PRR tend to increase net settlement payments. The overall market efficiency can be achieved only when multiple channels are available for traffic exchanges. Using a panel of 47 countries that exchanged telephone traffic with the U.S. between 1992 and 2004, we test the effects of bilateral market structures and the U.S. government policies on calling prices and settlement rates and the empirical results support our theoretical findings.

Аналіз характеристик нових мереж обміну інтернет-трафіком

Проведено дослідження характеристик трьох українських мереж обміну інтернет-трафіком. Порівняння таких характеристик як розподіл ступеню, середній коротший шлях, коефіцієнт кластеризації дозволило знайти в топології цих мереж як спільні риси, так і суттєві відмінності, які можуть бути використані в процесі пошуку оптимальних вузлів з точки зору приєднання до мережі Інтернет чи розміщенні в ній інформаційнихресурсів.

Internet Architecture Evolution and the Complex Economies of Content Peering

In recent years, the Internet has been evolving from a hierarchical (multi-level) network to a flatter structure, due in large part to the exponential increase in end user video consumption. This evolution of the Internet has resulted in more highly interconnected ISPs and content providers, with tens, hundreds, and even thousands of inter-domain connections. Each domain or autonomous system (AS) connects to many others through so-called peering connections aimed at reducing expenses and improving performance in a highly competitive on-demand video world. The economics of settlement-free “peering” with neighboring Internet service providers (ISPs), compared to buying “transit” from a backbone provider were attractive several years ago. However, we will show that this approach has created “diseconomies” and loopholes in the Internet ecosystem leading to unbalanced economics. This paper will look at the operation and architecture of the Internet today and how economics have played a strong role in the evolution of the topology. Peering was intended as a reciprocal relationship between ISPs used for symmetric traffic exchange without fees being passed between peering partners. However, as transit fees grew due to increasing video traffic, asymmetric peering with content partners (known as “content peering”) emerged as an alternative peering arrangement. Content peering relationships grew dramatically over the last several years and, as a result, transit expenses fell substantially from several hundred per month dollars to under $10 per Mb/s per month today. While this peering provided temporary economic relief for ISPs, the longer-term consequences were not anticipated. This paper makes the argument that large content providers have used their dominant traffic position (e.g., Google may represent 10 to 20 percent of transit traffic) to mandate content peering. ISPs faced with significantly increasing costs due to large volumes of content providers' traffic were compelled to accept asymmetric peering, in which more content was sourced into their networks than was sourced by their networks. This asymmetric peering was positioned by content providers as mutually beneficial to the ISPs but our analysis shows that the long term impact of content peering is negative for the ISPs. We have developed a representative economic model for the Internet which is used to provide insight into the cost and revenue distributions for different types of ISPs. This model is used to clearly and quantitatively demonstrate the economic imbalance that exists between ISPs and large content providers. © 2012 Alcatel-Lucent.

Efficient Bandwidth Utilization in DOCS

Taking into consideration the significance of multi domain dynamic optical circuit switching (DOCS) over other optical switching technologies, we compare the potential viability of DOCS and other optical circuit switching technologies for multi domain traffic exchange thus showing an enhanced algorithm that can used for efficient bandwidth utilization in DOCS. In this paper we make an effort to boost the use of DOCS in e-science technologies by utilizing bandwidth much more efficiently. Immediate request and scheduled request are the two features that our algorithm is covering.

Alien plants in southern South America. A framework for evaluation and management of mutual risk of invasion between Chile and Argentina

Most of the Chilean traffic exchange takes place along the border with Argentina. The road network between both countries facilitates the transport of alien plant species, raising the chance of new introductions of plant species and increasing the propagule pressure of already introduced plants. We used a modified version of the Australian Weed Risk Assessment method (AWRA) to analyze if alien plant species already present either exclusively in Chile or Argentina can be a potential source of risk for new alien species introduction and, specifically, which of the two countries poses a higher risk for its counterpart. We recorded 875 alien species of which 288 are exclusive to Chile, 283 are exclusive to Argentina, and 304 are shared by both countries. Considering the risk of new alien plants introductions, Chile presents a higher threat to Argentina than vice versa. Specifically, twenty-two alien species are exclusive to Chile, and are present on roadsides connecting both countries, hence they are regarded as a top risk for Argentina; a comparable top risk of alien species is absent from Argentinean roadsides. Both countries have a similar number of alien species being exclusive to one country, but are not present along roadsides (Chile 162; Argentina 186), which could represent a potential risk to the other country. The methodological approach proposed here may be a useful tool not only for screening potential new alien plant introductions, but also for the prioritization of eradication or control measures of those species already introduced.

Collaborative real-time traffic information generation and sharing framework for the intelligent transportation system

Real-time traffic information collection and data fusion is one of the most important tasks in the advanced traffic management system (ATMS), and sharing traffic information to users is an essential part of the advance traveler information system (ATIS) among the intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Traditionally, sensor-based schemes or probing-vehicle based schemes have been used for collecting traffic information, but the coverage, cost, and real-time issues have remained unsolved. In this paper, a wiki-like collaborative real-time traffic information collection, fusion and sharing framework is proposed, which includes user-centric traffic event reacting mechanism, and automatic agent-centric traffic information aggregating scheme. Smart traffic agents (STA) developed for various front-end devices have the location-aware two-way real-time traffic exchange capability, and built-in event-reporting mechanism to allow users to report the real-time traffic events around their locations. In addition to collecting traffic information, the framework also integrates heterogeneous external real-time traffic information data sources and internal historical traffic information database to predict real-time traffic status by knowledge base system technique.

An adaptive latency mitigation scheme for massively multiuser virtual environments

As massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVEs) expand in terms of size and user population, they tend toward using P2P architectures as a way to provide scalability without the need for large centralized resources. Distributed hash table (DHT)-based networks have been introduced as a promising option for overlay-based distributed massively multiuser virtual environment applications. However, overlay latency stretch seriously affects MMVE performance where QoS is crucial for real-time user collaboration. This work includes a series of efforts in the alleviation of such undesired latency. Our approach to latency mitigation consists of two phases. First, we propose a position-based ID assignment approach to minimize message hop-count by exploiting the clustered pattern of traffic exchange among MMVE users. Second, we introduce a new ant-based distributed neighbor selection scheme that can be used by MMVE users to select the best neighbors within their areas of interest. In order to evaluate the performance of this heuristic approach, we model the neighbor selection problem in the form of a network flow problem and use its solution as an optimality bound to compare the results. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms will compensate for DHT latency stretch to a high extent and the performance of the resulting system would closely follow the optimal bound while communication overhead is negligible.

Cooperative vehicle applications with cellular communication

The Cocar (Cooperative Cars) project is investigating the feasibility of cellular mobile communication technologies for rapid traffic data exchange. Ericsson, Vodafone, Daimler, MAN Nutzfahrzeuge und Volkswagen are cooperating with the three universities Erlangen-Nuremberg, Bremen, and RWTH Aachen to develop platform-independent communication protocols, innovative system components and cooperative vehicle applications of the future.

Integration of Geographic Information System for Transportation with Real-Time Traffic Simulation System

Real-time traffic information applications (RTIA) collect real-time traffic data from a wide variety of detectors. The problem with these applications is that they are complex and hard to maintain because of the large number of distributed detectors involved. However, it is well recognized that traffic simulation systems have the ability to improve the efficiency of traffic analysis, prediction, and control. This paper presents an application framework that integrates a real-time traffic simulation system with RTIA. Within this framework, a geographic information system for transportation (GIS-T) architecture, combined with a temporal–spatial database, provides a flexible way to present the real-time traffic information for road users. Several critical system components are introduced as well, including a real-time dynamic traffic data exchange model. The real-time simulation system, a static traffic model in GIS-T, and a Java-based application architecture are also briefly discussed.

Effects of ISP Interconnection Agreements on Internet Competition: The Case of the Network Access Point as a Cooperative Agreement for Internet Traffic Exchange

Effects of ISP Interconnection Agreements on Internet Competition: The Case of the Network Access Point as a Cooperative Agreement for Internet Traffic Exchange

Contention-Aware Communication Schedule for High-Speed Communication

A lot of efforts have been devoted to address the software overhead problem in the past decade, which is known as the major hindrance on high-speed communication. However, this paper shows that having a low-latency communication system does not guarantee to achieve high performance, as there are other communication issues that have not been fully addressed by the use of low-latency communication, such as contention and scheduling of communication events. In this paper, we use the complete exchange operation as a case study to show that with careful design of communication schedules, we can achieve efficient communication as well as prevent congestion. We have developed a complete exchange algorithm, the Synchronous Shuffle Exchange, which is an optimal algorithm on the non-blocking network. To avoid congestion loss caused by the non-deterministic delays in communication events, a global congestion control scheme is introduced. This scheme coordinates all participating nodes to monitor and regulate the traffic load, which effectively avoids congestion loss and maintains sufficient throughput to maximize the performance. To improve the effectiveness of the congestion control scheme when working on the hierarchical network, we incorporate information on the network topology to devise a contention-aware permutation. This permutation scheme generates a communication schedule, which is both node and switch contention-free as well as distributing the network loads more evenly across the hierarchy. This relieves the congestion build-up at the uplink ports and improves the synchronism of the traffic information exchange between cluster nodes. Performance results of our implementation on a 32-node cluster with various network configurations are examined and reported in this paper.

Development of an XML-Based Specification for Traffic Model Data Exchange

The proliferation of traffic software programs on the market has resulted in many very specialized programs, intended to analyze one or two specific items within a transportation network. Consequently, traffic engineers use multiple programs on a single project, which ironically has resulted in new inefficiency for the traffic engineer. Most of these programs deal with the same core set of data, for example, physical roadway characteristics, traffic demand levels, and traffic control variables. However, most of these programs have their own formats for saving data files. Therefore, these programs cannot share information directly or communicate with each other because of incompatible data formats. Thus, the traffic engineer is faced with manually reentering common data from one program into another. In addition to inefficiency, this also creates additional opportunities for data entry errors. XML is catching on rapidly as a means for exchanging data between two systems or users who deal with the same data but in different formats. Specific vocabularies have been developed for statistics, mathematics, chemistry, and many other disciplines. The traffic model markup language (TMML) is introduced as a resource for traffic model data representation, storage, rendering, and exchange. TMML structure and vocabulary are described, and examples of their use are presented.