MoN9: Ninth Mathematics of Networks meeting, 18th June, St Andrews University

Raul Landa (UCL) - Economic modeling of managed overlays

Most game theoretical models of peer-to-peer overlays focus on the incentives tensions between peers, thus not including the ISP as an active player (interesting exceptions can be found in recent work regarding ISP-content distribution and the selfish routing literature). However, given the large amount of bandwidth that peer-to-peer systems can command, the ISPs have taken a much more active role in the management of peer-to-peer, spanning from techniques such as bandwidth capping or throttling to cooperative approaches such as P4P/ALTO.

Although the modelling of the incentive dynamics of coexisting managed overlays with a single underlying ISP is interesting in its own right, we seek to model the preferences of overlays in the more general setting where they can choose to allocate their traffic matrix between a set of different ISPs. By considering such an “unbundled ISPs” model together with multiple competing P4P-enabled overlays, it becomes possible to consider a much wider array of preferences, thus achieving a more general model for the incentives of managed overlays. We consider that a model of managed overlay preferences that allows ISPs to predict the traffic matrices that an overlay will demand as a given of a given price structure by itself and its competing ISPs would be of great help for network dimensioning, profit optimisation and traffic engineering.

Biography

Raul Landa (raul.landa@ieee.org) is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London. After working in the development of network management software platforms from 2000 to 2005, Dr Landa joined the MASTS and PeerLive research projects in UCL. His research interests revolve around the application of models from economics and sociology to the solution of networking problems. Dr Landa received a B.S. in Communications Engineering by ITESM (Mexico City), an M.S. in Data Communications from the University of Sheffield (UK) and a Diploma in Information Security from UNAM (Mexico City), in 1998, 2000 and 2004 respectively, and a PhD degree from UCL in 2010. Dr Landa’s publications can be found here.

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Contact: Richard G. Clegg (richard@richardclegg.org) or Keith Briggs (mailto:keith.briggs_at_bt_dot_com)