[Nets-seminars] Talk Friday 25th May 16:00 UCL EE

Richard G. Clegg richard at richardclegg.org
Fri May 18 16:38:18 BST 2012


This Friday's talk (25th May) is at 16:00 in GS/302, and the speaker is me.

"ENVISION: Stable ISP Traffic Balancing in Space and Time"

This talk is the first of two talks about research arising from the EU 
project ENVISION, a project which looks at the engineering and 
optimisation of large overlay networks and how applications and ISPs 
interact in such networks.  This work looks at the issue of ISP network 
costs (in particular transit costs).  Such costs are usually charged 
using 95th percentile billing.  Often an ISP or the user has some degree 
of freedom about where such traffic could be routed, for example, 
traffic to CDNs could be obtained from different nodes, traffic from 
one-click hosts could be obtained from different servers and traffic 
from peer-to-peer networks could be obtained from different peers. 
  Similarly often an ISP or user has some freedom about what time of day 
traffic could be sent.  In the case of large data transfers between data 
centers or CDNs for example, this could be delayed until the "off-peak". 
  Users might be incentivised to delay large downloads until different 
time periods.  A small but growing body of research has looked at the 
separate problems of time delaying traffic and of moving traffic to 
different routes to optimise network performance.

In this paper we consider the problems together of moving traffic in 
time and in space toward an optimal solution for pricing, and hence to 
reduce ISP bills.  Techniques from game theory can be used to assess the 
correct "price" for a given link at a given time of day.  Techniques 
from dynamical systems can be used to create a method for allocating 
traffic between times and links in a "stable" manner which avoids 
oscillations.

-- 
Richard G. Clegg,
Dept of Elec. Eng.,
University College London
http://www.richardclegg.org/

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