Jan Gerke

How to overcome the feasibility problem for tariffing Internet services: the cumulus pricing scheme

The design of tariff schemes for packet-based network services, especially for differentiated Internet services, has turned out to be a non-trivial task. This is mainly due to the issue of how to account for the immense number of individual packets. This paper proposes a paradigm shift and argues that the solution of this feasibility problem is not a matter of coping with complexity, but instead a question of multidimensional mappings of time-scales. The cumulus pricing scheme (CPS) as introduced and investigated here turns out to be a good example for the resulting simple, transparent, market-managed, and feasible Internet tariff schemes.

An Architecture for a Service Oriented Peer-to-Peer System (SOPPS)

ABSTRACT Peer-to-peer (p2p) systems have regained much attention during recent years. While this is mostly due to their two main applications filesharing and instant messaging, this paper proposes to create a p2p system with generic support for services of any kind, called SOPPS. Furthermore, it proposes to use market mechanisms to manage these services. In order to provide this functionality and to make full use of key advantages of p2p, SOPPS must fulfill more detailed requirements, which have been investigated in this paper. Three major models found the SOPPS architecture and describe in particular the use of SOPPS, its underlying network, and the architecture of a SOPPS peer. Finally, the application of this architecture as well as of its interfaces are described for a content sharing scenario.

Management of differentiated services usage by the Cumulus pricing scheme and a generic Internet charging system

Since the Internet is on the move to provide differentiated services, for the backbone based on the differentiated services architecture (DiffServ), suitable management mechanisms are required. Scalable solutions for overload management are a must, such as economically-driven functions of charging and pricing. Future commercial networks need to offer as well a new view of pricing, considered as management information. Therefore, the Cumulus pricing scheme (CPS) explicitly proposed here for the DiffServ technology is the only approach known so far, which defines a clear relation between different time scales of measurement, accounting, and charging periods. The scheme is flexible enough to allow network management according to actual forces of the market. CPSs implementation is supported by a designed generic Internet charging system offering a service-independent architecture and integrating interchangeably economically-controlled network management functions of charge calculation and pricing. In particular, it has been applied to DiffServ and the new CPS.

SOPPS Bilateral Negotiations and VETO Welfare Auctions for Service Procurement

Service‐oriented peer‐to‐peer networks such as SOPPS create distributed service markets. In order to fully enable these markets, the social welfare of service usage has to be maximized during service procurement. To this end, this paper discusses the influences on the social welfare of service usage. As procurement mechanisms, bilateral negotiations and the procurement auction VETO are described and compared against each other. The criteria for evaluation are the achieved welfare maximization, the fairness of welfare distribution between service consumer and service provider, and the effort of carrying out the procurement mechanism. The comparison shows that for all three criteria, VETO produces better results. Especially, VETO is able to always achieve a maximization of the welfare. Thus, it is shown, that VETO is the better service procurement mechanism and enables the service market, for normal services as well as for composed services.

VETO - enabling a P2P-based market for composed services

Service-oriented peer-to-peer architectures combine the benefits of service-oriented architectures and peer-to-peer networks, such as loose coupling and sealability. They also support service composition, the combining of existing services into new ones. Until now, only composition service strategies for a single peer acting as a service composer have been investigated. Therefore, this paper investigates the market for composed services. It is shown that this market forms an oligopoly and, thus, requires incentive-compatible service pricing. In consequence, the vickrey procurement auction VETO has been developed determining the pricing mechanism in a fully distributed manner. It is proven that VETO is incentive-compatible and maximizes the markets welfare. Furthermore, the VETO protocol is specified and it is shown that this protocol prevents collusion within the auction. Still, VETO upholds the peer-to-peer paradigm by only relying on the peers which are taking part in the auction, no additional trusted entities or super-peers are required

Charging for differentiated Internet services

Internet communications today play a major role in data transport within the local as well as the wide area. On one hand, since emerging networked applications require a variety of different communication services, the number of service classes offered by service providers has to be targeted at this demand. On the other hand, assuming that a set of different traffic classes are offered by service providers, the right incentives have to be provided, ensuring that applications or their users select the most appropriate traffic class. Even though users are considered to be selective, they intend to chose that class which offers the best available Quality-of-Service (QoS), as long as the price to be paid does not exceed their willingness-to-pay. Therefore, charging for differentiated Internet services is important in a commercialized Internet. The current Internet does not cater for charging at all, since the technology required, the pricing models going beyond a flat-fee approach, and the appropriate efficiency in technical as well as economic terms are still missing on a global basis. This paper outlines the major problems for charging Internet services and describes briefly an important new solution for a pricing approach, which solves the Internet pricing feasibility problem. Based on these preconditions an Internet Charging System (ICS) is introduced, focusing mainly on its leading characteristics and its generic approach to instantiate for a given scenario.