With the fast development of video and voice network applications, CDN (Content Distribution Networks) and P2P (Peer-to-Peer) content distribution technologies have gradually matured. How to effectively use Internet resources thus has attracted more and more attentions. For the study of resource pricing, a whole pricing strategy containing pricing models, mechanisms and methods covers all the related topics. We first introduce three basic Internet resource pricing models through an Internet cost analysis. Then, with the evolution of service types, we introduce several corresponding mechanisms which can ensure pricing implementation and resource allocation. On network resource pricing methods, we discuss the utility optimization in economics, and emphasize two classes of pricing methods (including system optimization and entities' strategic optimizations). Finally, we conclude the paper and forecast the research direction on pricing strategy which is applicable to novel service situation in the near future.
Price and the quality of service are two key factors taken into account by wireless network users when they choose their network provider. The recent advances in wireless technology and massive infrastructure deployments has led to better coverage, and currently at each given wirelessly covered area there are a few network providers and each have different pricing strategies. These providers can potentially set unfair expensive prices for their services. In this paper, we propose a novel crowdsourcing-based approach for fair wireless service pricing in Internet of Things (IoT). In our consider…
Mobile Collaborative Internet Access (MCA) enables mobile users to share their Internet through flexible tethering arrangements. This can potentially make better use of network resources. However, from a mobile network operator's (MNO's) viewpoint, it can either reduce revenue or increase congestion, and thus has been blocked by some MNOs in practice. We propose a hybrid pricing framework for MNOs who charge users separately for access and tethering. This scheme serves to coordinate the tethering decisions of mobile users with MNO network management objectives. We analyze the MNOs' equilibrium…
ISPs are increasingly selling "tiered" contracts, which offer Internet connectivity to wholesale customers in bundles, at rates based on the cost of the links that the traffic in the bundle is traversing. Although providers have already begun to implement and deploy tiered pricing contracts, little is known about how such pricing affects ISPs and their customers. While contracts that sell connectivity on finer granularities improve market efficiency, they are also more costly for ISPs to implement and more difficult for customers to understand. In this work we present two contributions: (1) we…
Reverse pricing has been recognized as an effective tool to handle demand uncertainty in the travel industry (e.g., airlines and hotels). To investigate its viability for communication networks, we study the practical limitations of (operator-driven) time-dependent pricing that has been recently introduced, taking into account demand uncertainty. Compared to (operator-driven) time-dependent pricing, we show that the proposed pricing scheme can achieve "triple-win" solutions: an increase in the total average revenue of the operator; higher average resource utilization efficiency; and an increme…
Recent advances in technology enable public or commercial establishments and individual data plan subscribers to operate as Wi-Fi providers, offering Internet access. However, the model of a monthly flat service fee charged by ISP to establishment or individual WFPs offers very little incentives for ISP to provide additional bandwidth to WFPs customers. Thus, these users may experience insufficient bandwidth when there is high demand for bandwidth. In addition, ISP even discourages individual subscribers to provide Internet access through their smartphone because such practices may cause marke…
University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；York University（约克大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）
Internet of things (IoT) produces massive data from devices embedded with sensors. The IoT data allows creating profitable services using machine learning. However, previous research does not address the problem of optimal pricing and bundling of machine learning-based IoT services. In this paper, we define the data value and service quality from a machine learning perspective. We present an IoT market model which consists of data vendors selling data to service providers, and service providers offering IoT services to customers. Then, we introduce optimal pricing schemes for the standalone an…
Mobile data traffic has been steadily rising in the past years. This has generated a significant interest in the deployment of incentive mechanisms to reduce peak-time congestion. Typically, the design of these mechanisms requires information about user demand and sensitivity to prices. Such information is naturally imperfect. In this paper, we propose a \emph{fixed-budget rebate mechanism} that gives each user a reward proportional to his percentage contribution to the aggregate reduction in peak time demand. For comparison, we also study a time-of-day pricing mechanism that gives each user a…
Traditionally, Internet Access Providers (APs) only charge end-users for Internet access services; however, to recoup infrastructure costs and increase revenues, some APs have recently adopted two-sided pricing schemes under which both end-users and content providers are charged. Meanwhile, with the rapid growth of traffic, network congestion could seriously degrade user experiences and influence providers' utility. To optimize profit and social welfare, APs and regulators need to design appropriate pricing strategies and regulatory policies that take the effects of network congestion into con…
This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of economic and pricing models for resource management in cloud networking. To achieve sustainable profit advantage, cost reduction, and flexibility in provisioning of cloud resources, resource management in cloud networking requires adaptive and robust designs to address many issues, e.g., resource allocation, bandwidth reservation, request allocation, and workload allocation. Economic and pricing models have received a lot of attention as they can lead to desirable performance in terms of social welfare, fairness, truthful…
We study online resource allocation in a cloud computing platform, through a posted pricing mechanism: The cloud provider publishes a unit price for each resource type, which may vary over time; upon arrival at the cloud system, a cloud user either takes the current prices, renting resources to execute its job, or refuses the prices without running its job there. We design pricing functions based on the current resource utilization ratios, in a wide array of demand-supply relationships and resource occupation durations, and prove worst-case competitive ratios of the pricing functions in terms …
Representatives of several Internet service providers (ISPs) have expressed their wish to see a substantial change in the pricing policies of the Internet. In particular, they would like to see content providers (CPs) pay for use of the network, given the large amount of resources they use. This would be in clear violation of the "network neutrality" principle that had characterized the development of the wireline Internet. Our first goal in this paper is to propose and study possible ways of implementing such payments and of regulating their amount. We introduce a model that includes the user…
This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of economic and pricing theory for resource management in the evolving fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. The 5G wireless networks are envisioned to overcome existing limitations of cellular networks in terms of data rate, capacity, latency, energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, coverage, reliability, and cost per information transfer. To achieve the goals, the 5G systems will adopt emerging technologies such as massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), mmWave communications, and dense Heterogeneous Networks (He…
Privacy-Aware Spectrum Pricing and Power Control Optimization for LEO Satellite Internet-of-Things
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Information and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学信息与电子工程学院）；College of Marine Electrical Engineering, Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学海洋电气工程学院）
Internet services are traditionally priced at flat rates; however, many Internet service providers (ISPs) have recently shifted towards two-part tariffs where a data cap is imposed to restrain data demand from heavy users. Although the two-part tariff could generally increase the revenue for ISPs and has been supported by the US FCC, the role of data cap and its optimal pricing structures are not well understood. In this article, we study the impact of data cap on the optimal two-part pricing schemes for congestion-prone service markets. We model users' demand and preferences over pricing and …
Indoor cell phone users often suffer from poor connectivity. One promising solution, femtocell technology, has been rapidly developed and deployed over the past few years. One of the biggest challenges for femtocell deployment is lack of a clear business model. This paper investigates the economic incentive for the cellular operator (also called macrocell operator) to enable femtocell service by leasing spectrum resource to an independent femtocell operator. On the one hand, femtocell services can increase communication service quality and thus increase the efficiency of the spectrum resource.…
Technology advancements on sensing, communications, and computing directly accelerate the recent development of Internet of Things (IoT), leading to rich and diverse applications in industry and business processes. For enabling IoT applications, smart devices and networks rely on the capabilities for information collection, processing and tight collaboration with their neighbors. However, the rapid proliferation of IoT devices and real-time IoT applications result in dramatically increased demand for communication and computing resources, posing a significant challenge for the underlying resou…
The adoption of market-based principles in resource management systems for computational infrastructures such as grids and clusters allows for matching demand and supply for resources in a utility maximizing manner. As such, they offer a promise of producing more efficient resource allocations, compared to traditional system-centric approaches that do not allow consumers and providers to express their valuations for computational resources. In this paper, we investigate the pricing of resources in grids through the use of a computational commodity market of CPU resources, where resource prices…
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) behavioural mode has been introduced in IEEE 802.15.4e standard to address the ultra-high reliability and ultra-low power communication requirements of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. Scheduling the packet transmissions in IIoT networks is a difficult task owing to the limited resources and dynamic topology. In this paper, we propose a phasic policy gradient (PPG) based TSCH schedule learning algorithm. The proposed PPG based scheduling algorithm overcomes the drawbacks of totally distributed and totally centralized deep reinforcement learning…
At present Internet has emerged as a country's predominant and viable data communication infrastructure. The Autonomous System (AS) resources which are building blocks of the Internet are AS numbers, IPv4 and IPv6 Prefixes. AS number growth is one of Internet infrastructure development indicators. Hence understanding on long term trend and stochastic variation behaviour are essential to detect significant events during the growth. In this work, time series based approximation is considered for mathematical modelling and forecast the yearly AS growth. The AS data of five countries namely India,…
The rapid growth of multimedia consumption has triggered technical, economic, and business innovations that improve the quality and accessibility of content. It has also opened new markets, promising large revenues for industry players. However, new technologies also pose new questions regarding the legal aspects of content delivery, which are often resolved through litigation between copyright owners and content distributors. The precedents set by these cases will act as a game changer in the content delivery industry and will shape the existing offerings in the market in terms of how new tec…
In the sensing as a service paradigm, Internet of Things (IoT) Middleware platforms allow data consumers to retrieve the data they want without knowing the underlying technical details of IoT resources (i.e. sensors and data processing components). However, configuring an IoT middleware platform and retrieving data is a significant challenge for data consumers as it requires both technical knowledge and domain expertise. In this paper, we propose a knowledge driven approach called Context Aware Sensor Configuration Model (CASCOM) to simplify the process of configuring IoT middleware platforms,…
The first decade of the 21st century has seen tremendous improvements in mobile internet and its technologies. The high traffic volume of services such as video conference and other real-time traffic applications are imposing a great challenge on networks. In the meantime, demand for the use of mobile devices in computation and communication such as smart phones, personal digital assistants, and mobile-enabled laptops has grown rapidly. These services have driven the demand for increasing and guaranteing bandwidth requirements in the network. A direction of this paper is in the case of resourc…
In this document we study the application of weighted proportional fairness to data flows in the Internet. We let the users set the weights of their connections in order to maximise the utility they get from the network. When combined with a pricing scheme where connections are billed by weight and time, such a system is known to maximise the total utility of the network. Our study case is a national Web cache server connected to long distance links. We propose two ways of weighting TCP connections by manipulating some parameters of the protocol and present results from simulations and prototy…
Video streaming is dominating the Internet. To compete with the performance of traditional cable and satellite options, content providers outsource the content delivery to third-party content distribution networks and brokers. However, no existing monitoring mechanism offers a multilateral view of a streaming service's performance. In other words, no auditing mechanism reflects the mutual agreement of content providers, content distributors and end-users alike about how well, or not, a service performs. In this paper, we present UgoVor, a system for monitoring multilateral streaming contracts,…
The revenue maximization problem of service provider is considered and different pricing schemes to solve the above problem are implemented. The service provider can choose an apt pricing scheme subjected to limited resources, if he knows the utility function and identity of the user. The complete price differentiation can achieve a large revenue gain but has high implementation complexity. The partial price differentiation scheme to overcome the high implementational complexity of complete price differentiation scheme is also studied. A polynomial- time algorithm is designed for partial price…
Traditionally, network operators have used simple flat-rate broadband data plans for both wired and wireless network access. But today, with the popularity of mobile devices and exponential growth of apps, videos, and clouds, service providers are gradually moving towards more sophisticated pricing schemes. This decade will therefore likely witness a major change in the ways in which network resources are managed, and the role of economics in allocating these resources. This survey reviews some of the well-known past broadband pricing proposals (both static and dynamic), including their curren…
The surging global mobile data traffic challenges the economic viability of cellular networks and calls for innovative solutions to reduce the network congestion and improve user experience. In this context, user-provided networks (UPNs), where mobile users share their Internet access by exploiting their diverse network resources and needs, turn out to be very promising. Heterogeneous users with advanced handheld devices can form connections in a distributed fashion and unleash dormant network resources at the network edge. However, the success of such services heavily depends on users' willin…
The vulnerability of the Internet has been demonstrated by prominent IP prefix hijacking events. Major outages such as the China Telecom incident in 2010 stimulate speculations about malicious intentions behind such anomalies. Surprisingly, almost all discussions in the current literature assume that hijacking incidents are enabled by the lack of security mechanisms in the inter-domain routing protocol BGP. In this paper, we discuss an attacker model that accounts for the hijacking of network ownership information stored in Regional Internet Registry (RIR) databases. We show that such threats …
This paper proposes a distributed framework for demand response and user adaptation in smart grid networks. In particular, we borrow the concept of congestion pricing in Internet traffic control and show that pricing information is very useful to regulate user demand and hence balance network load. User preference is modeled as a willingness to pay parameter which can be seen as an indicator of differential quality of service. Both analysis and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the dynamics and convergence behavior of the algorithm.
The congestion pricing is an efficient allocation approach to mediate demand and supply of network resources. Different from the previous pricing using Affine Marginal Cost (AMC), we focus on studying the game between network coding and routing flows sharing a single link when users are price anticipating based on an Average Cost Sharing (ACS) pricing mechanism. We characterize the worst-case efficiency bounds of the game compared with the optimal, i.e., the price-of anarchy (POA), which can be low bound 50% with routing only. When both network coding and routing are applied, the POA can be as…
An operator-assisted user-provided network (UPN) has the potential to achieve a low cost ubiquitous Internet connectivity, without significantly increasing the network infrastructure investment. In this paper, we consider such a network where the network operator encourages some of her subscribers to operate as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots (hosts), providing Internet connectivity for other subscribers (clients). We formulate the interaction between the operator and mobile users as a two-stage game. In Stage I, the operator determines the usage-based pricing and quota-based incentive mechanism for the…
Fog computing is becoming a vital component for Internet of things (IoT) applications, acting as its computational engine. Mission-critical IoT applications are highly sensitive to latency, which depends on the physical location of the cloud server. Fog nodes of varying response rates are available to the cloud service provider (CSP) and it is faced with a challenge of forwarding the sequentially received IoT data to one of the fog nodes for processing. Since the arrival times and nature of requests is random, it is important to optimally classify the requests in real-time and allocate availab…
Nowadays digital services, such as cloud computing and network access services, allow dynamic resource allocation and virtual resource isolation. This trend can create a new paradigm of flexible pricing schemes. A simple pricing scheme is to allocate multiple isolated service classes with differentiated prices, namely Paris Metro Pricing (PMP). The benefits of PMP are its simplicity and applicability to a wide variety of general digital services, without considering specific performance guarantees for different service classes. The central issue of our study is whether PMP is economically viab…
Increasing number of the cloud-based Internet applications demands for efficient resource and cost management. This paper proposes a real-time group auction system for the cloud instance market. The system is designed based on a combinatorial double auction, and its applicability and effectiveness are evaluated in terms of resource efficiency and monetary benefits to auction participants (e.g., cloud users and providers). The proposed auction system assists them to decide when and how providers allocate their resources to which users. Furthermore, we propose a distributed algorithm using a gro…
As the number of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) increases, the need for performing on-premises tasks within hospitals or medical centers also increases. Many healthcare organizations are progressively embracing or adopting an edge computing paradigm such that computationally intensive tasks can be processed at the edge of the network in order to avoid latency and network reliability issues associated with offloading tasks to the cloud. The problem, however, hospitals or medical centers may not be equipped with sufficient computing resources that can process advanced ML or AI tasks efficient…
Evidence indicates that downloading on-demand videos accounts for a dramatic increase in data traffic over cellular networks. Caching popular videos in the storage of small-cell base stations (SBS), namely, small-cell caching, is an efficient technology for reducing the transmission latency whilst mitigating the redundant transmissions of popular videos over back-haul channels. In this paper, we consider a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a network service provider (NSP), several video retailers (VR), and mobile users (MU). The NSP leases its SBSs to the VRs for the purpo…
The rapid growth of the world's population demands more natural resources, food, and space. World-renowned physicist Stephan Hawking has argued that soon we will require another world to live on because we are running out of space and natural resources. This ever-increasing demand for resources and space needs novel technologies to explore natural resources, produce more crops, and explore outer space. Internet of X-things (X-IoT) is an enabling technology to overcome all of the above issues. In this article, we have presented an overview of a unified framework of X-IoT. The framework of X-IoT…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of Future Internet and will comprise many billions of Internet Connected Objects (ICO) or `things' where things can sense, communicate, compute and potentially actuate as well as have intelligence, multi-modal interfaces, physical/ virtual identities and attributes. Collecting data from these objects is an important task as it allows software systems to understand the environment better. Many different hardware devices may involve in the process of collecting and uploading sensor data to the cloud where complex processing can occur. Further, we cannot expec…
Domain Resource Integrated System (DRIS) is introduced in this paper. DRIS is a hierarchical distributed Internet information retrieval system. This system will solve some bottleneck problems such as long update interval, poor coverage in current web search system. DRIS will build the information retrieval infrastructure of Internet, but not a commercial search engine. The protocol series of DRIS are also detailed in this paper.
The Tactile Internet (TI) is one of the next generation wireless network services with end to end (E2E) delay as low as 1~ms. Since this ultra low E2E delay cannot be met in the current 4G network architecture, it is necessary to investigate this service in the next generation wireless network by considering new technologies such as network function virtualization (NFV). On the other hand, given the importance of E2E delay in the TI service, it is crucial to consider the delay of all parts of the network, including the radio access part and the NFV core part. In this paper, for the first time,…
