TY - GEN
T1 - On the Economics of Network Interconnections and Net Neutrality
AU - Patchala, Sravan
AU - Lee, Seung Hyun
AU - Joo, Changhee
AU - Manjunath, D.
N1 - Funding Information:
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Sravan Patchala and D. Manjunath are with the Bharti Centre for Communications in IIT Bombay. This work was supported in part by grants from CEFIPRA, DST under the Indo-Korea joint programme of cooperation in Science and Technology, and the NRF grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2017K1A3A1A19070720).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/5/9
Y1 - 2019/5/9
N2 - The Internet of symmetric traffic flows between networks and a hierarchical topology, has long given way to one with a significantly asymmteric traffic flows and a flatter topology. The Internet topology of today may be characterised as having three key types of networks - content providers, user access providers, and transit providers. Further, in this Internet, best-effort routing of centrally stored content using distributed protocols has been seen to be inadequate to provide a suitably reliable transport service to provide the requisite quality of service to the end user. Two important developments to mitigate this gap in the capability of the Internet and the needs of modern content are the following. (1) Proliferation of content distribution networks (2) direct peering between content networks and ISPs. In this paper we analyze the economics of such interconnections. Using microeconomic models from industrial organization literature, we first develop the conditions for a content provider to connect directly to a service provider. Further, when such a direct link is indeed sought, we analyze the quality of the link vis-a-vis the default option of using a transit service. We then analyze the content provider market coverage by the content distribution networks. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results on the objectives sought by net neutrality regimes.
AB - The Internet of symmetric traffic flows between networks and a hierarchical topology, has long given way to one with a significantly asymmteric traffic flows and a flatter topology. The Internet topology of today may be characterised as having three key types of networks - content providers, user access providers, and transit providers. Further, in this Internet, best-effort routing of centrally stored content using distributed protocols has been seen to be inadequate to provide a suitably reliable transport service to provide the requisite quality of service to the end user. Two important developments to mitigate this gap in the capability of the Internet and the needs of modern content are the following. (1) Proliferation of content distribution networks (2) direct peering between content networks and ISPs. In this paper we analyze the economics of such interconnections. Using microeconomic models from industrial organization literature, we first develop the conditions for a content provider to connect directly to a service provider. Further, when such a direct link is indeed sought, we analyze the quality of the link vis-a-vis the default option of using a transit service. We then analyze the content provider market coverage by the content distribution networks. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results on the objectives sought by net neutrality regimes.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066492540&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/COMSNETS.2019.8711013
DO - 10.1109/COMSNETS.2019.8711013
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85066492540
T3 - 2019 11th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2019
SP - 192
EP - 199
BT - 2019 11th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2019
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 11th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2019
Y2 - 7 January 2019 through 11 January 2019
ER -