A market-based model for the bandwidth management of IntServ-DiffServ QoS interconnection: A network economic approach

Due to the recent evolution of telecommunications infrastructure and the Internet as a commodity market for bandwidth, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will encounter a new set of questions concerned with bandwidth management for the network interconnection. This dissertation proposes a market-based bandwidth management model for DiffServ networks using an implementation of the bandwidth management agent, BMP (Bandwidth Management Point). Bandwidth management problems of a backbone ISP, a Differentiated Service (DiffServ) network with an interconnection to an Integrated Service (IntServ) network, are examined through a network economic approach. This research deals with several important interconnection mechanisms to interwork with the proposed market-based bandwidth mechanisms. The researcher uses network economic models for the formulation of an optimization problem for the interconnection and resource allocation policy of the DiffServ network. The BMP was proposed in order to use the price data of the bandwidth commodity market to capture the opportunity costs for the DiffServ's network services. Different opportunity costs are estimated based on the results of a network simulation using traffic flow statistics measured from a current Internet backbone. By using these economic models, the researcher numerically simulated the behavior of backbone network ISPs to optimize their profits for various scenarios. Several important hypotheses related to the bandwidth management of QoS interconnections are tested based on the results of numerical simulations for different sets of market and demand assumptions. The expectations of this research are that the implications of this dissertation will be useful to backbone ISP network planners, bandwidth management system developers, and the regulators concerned with the QoS interconnection issues of the next-generation Internet.