ChoiceNet
An Economy Plane for the Internet
Overview
The Internet has been a key enabling technology for many
new distributed applications and services. However, the deployment
of new protocols and services in the Internet infrastructure itself
has been sluggish, especially where economic incentives for network
providers are unclear. In this project, we seek to develop an "economy plane"
for the Internet that enables network providers to offer new
network-based services (QoS, storage, etc.) for sale to customers.
The explicit connection between economic relationships and
network services across various time scales enables users to
select among service alternatives. The resulting competition
among network service providers will lead to overall better
technological solutions and more competitive prices.
This project is one of five NSF-sponsored Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects.
Vision
The goal of ChoiceNet is to enable choices and the associated economic relationships between entities in the network. ChoiceNet makes it possible for network service providers to compete for customers and be rewarded for quality and innovation. In today’s network, money enters the network ecosystem only around the edges: consumers (individuals or enterprises) pay access providers for Internet service. Most access providers, in turn, pay other ISPs to carry their traffic to/from the rest of the Internet. Indeed, most end-to-end traffic in the Internet traverses at least three distinct service
providers.
Thus, in today’s Internet (i) no single provider controls all end-to-end paths; (ii) money flow between providers is outside the architecture and by necessity changes slowly; and
(iii) traffic flow is constrained at the granularity of providers
to follow the money flow. The result is that transit providers
have neither means nor incentive to compete via new service offerings, and consumers have essentially no control over
the service they receive or its quality. A central thesis of
ChoiceNet is that enabling money flow to follow traffic flow
(instead of vice versa), coupled with greater support for
choice among end-users, should lead to increased provider
competition and more innovation.
ChoiceNet’s economy plane aims to give assurances to
providers that they can compete for customers and be compensated for the services they render. At the same time,
ChoiceNet provides users with the ability to select from a
set of offerings and combine them to form complex services,
thereby separating services that are currently entangled in
the current Internet. Key to such an architecture is the
ability to market services and then form or dissolve business relationships on (potentially small) time scales. Moreover, ChoiceNet must enable providers (and consumers) to
prove (or verify) that the contracted service was rendered
as promised.
Example
To illustrate the vision for ChoiceNet with a specific example, consider how choice can motivate the deployment of innovative new services and protocols for streaming video content.
In the current Internet, there are a number of different content providers that offer video streaming services (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc.). While users can choose a video
content provider, users cannot choose how the network handles the streaming traffic produced by the provider as it
traverses the network. As a result, users can only hope that
they receive the content with enough quality of service to
have an enjoyable experience. Content providers also have
little or no control over the network when sending their content and instead focus on coding and quality adaptation
techniques to adjust to changing network conditions.
In a ChoiceNet-enabled Internet, we envision that users
will explicitly select network services from a marketplace of
competing service offerings. Every aspect of the network
can be marketed and sold as a service. Moreover, it is possible to combine services, such as specific network paths, in-network storage, packet forwarding prioritization, etc., into
a tailored movie-watching package. These packages can be
crafted by knowledgeable users, their applications, or, more
likely, by service providers. Users can choose among different packages, experience their quality, and decide which
package they want to continue using and paying for.
While this scenario requires significant changes in how
economic relationships are established between customers
and providers, there is also need for technological change.
Services need to be general, so that they can be combined
into useful packages. Also, the network infrastructure itself
needs to be diverse enough to offer a variety of choices at the
network layer. While the Internet offers a wide range of end-system services, the set of end-to-end network/transport
layer services available is rather small. However, recent advances in software defined networking, programmable networks, and cloud computing make it possible to offer such
alternative services.
Not only should ChoiceNet support alternatives for consumers to choose from and purchase, but it also needs to
support a variety of economic relationships. Providers may
bundle and resell services offered by others, adding value
in the process; in doing so they act as both customers and
providers. For example, today’s mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) provide cellular network access to users
through short-term service contracts, but do not operate
their own infrastructure. Instead they resell network access
from other providers. Similarly, crowdroaming enables net
work access to participants by sharing access points. These
current-day examples, however, lack a general architecture
(or in some cases specific economic models), which is what
ChoiceNet aims to provide.
News
Papers
The ChoiceNet architecture is described in these papers:
- Tilman Wolf, James Griffioen, Kenneth L. Calvert, Rudra Dutta, George N. Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, and
Anna Nagurney. ChoiceNet: toward an economy plane for the Internet. ACM SIGCOMM Computer
Communication Review, 44(3):58–65, July 2014. DOI PDF from ACM
- Tilman Wolf, James Griffioen, Kenneth L. Calvert, Rudra Dutta, George N. Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, and
Anna Nagurney. Choice as a principle in network architecture. In Prof. of ACM Annual Conference of the Special
Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), pages 105–106, Helsinki, Finland, August 2012. (Poster) DOI PDF from ACM
Additional papers that address specific issues within ChoiceNet are here:
- Prototype Implementation:
- Xinming Chen, Tilman Wolf, Jim Griffioen, Onur Ascigil, Rudra Dutta, George Rouskas, Shireesh
Bhat, Ilya Baldin, and Ken Calvert. Design of a protocol to enable economic transactions for network
services. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), pages 5354–5359,
London, UK, June 2015. DOI
- David Brown, Onur Ascigil, Hussamuddin Nasir, Charles Carpenter, James Griffioen, and Kenneth Calvert, Designing A GENI Experimenter Tool To Support The ChoiceNet Internet Architecture, International Workshop on Computer and Networking Experimental Research using Testbeds,
Raleigh, NC,
October 2014. DOI
- Economics:
- Andres Marentes, Thiago Teixeira, and Tilman Wolf. Exploring economic dynamics in an internet
with service choices. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), pages
5272–5277, London, UK, June 2015. DOI
- Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Tilman Wolf, and Ladimer S. Nagurney. A game theory model for
a differentiated service-oriented Internet with duration-based contracts. In Proc. of 14th INFORMS
Computing Society Conference (ICS), pages 15–29, Richmond, VA, January 2015. link
- Sara Saberi, Anna Nagurney, and Tilman Wolf. A network economic game theory model of a service-oriented internet with price and quality competition in both content and network provision. Accepted for publication in Service Science, 6(4):229–250, December 2014. DOI
- Anna Nagurney and Tilman Wolf. A Cournot-Nash-Bertrand game theory model of a service-oriented
internet with price and quality competition among network transport providers. Computational
Management Science, 11(4):475–502, October 2014. DOI
- Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, Sara Saberi, and Tilman Wolf. A Dynamic Network Economic Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition. In Network Models in Economics and Finance, Valery A. Kalyagin, Panos M. Pardalos, and Themistocles M. Rassias, Editors, Springer International Publishing Switzerland, pages 239–264, September 2014. DOI
- Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, Sara Saberi, and Tilman Wolf. A dynamic network economic model of a
service-oriented internet with price and quality competition. In Valery A. Kalyagin, Panos M. Pardalos,
and Themistocles M. Rassias, editors, Network Models in Economics and Finance, chapter 12, pages
239–264. Springer International Publishing, September 2014.
- Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, Tilman Wolf, and Sara Saberi. A network economic game theory model
of a service-oriented internet with choices and quality competition. NETNOMICS: Economic Research
and Electronic Networking, 14(1–2):1–25, November 2013. (Notable Article in Computing in 2013
by ACM Computing Reviews) DOI
- Overview:
- George N. Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, Ken Calvert, Rudra Dutta, Jim Griffioen, Anna Nagurney, and Tilman
Wolf. ChoiceNet: Network innovation through choice. In Proc. of 17th International Conference on
Optical Networking Design and Modeling (ONDM), Brest, France, April 2013.
- Access Control:
- Xinming Chen, Hao Cai, and Tilman Wolf. Multi-criteria routing in networks with path choices. In Proc. of 23rd IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), San Francisco, CA, November
2015.
- Hao Cai, Xinming Chen, and Tilman Wolf. OrthCredential: A new network capability design for
high-performance access control. In Proc. of 22nd IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols
(ICNP), Raleigh, NC, October 2014. DOI
- Introspection / Measurement:
- Ahmet C. Babaoglu and Rudra Dutta. A Verification Service Architecture for the Future Internet. In Proc. of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Nassau, Bahamas, August 2013. DOI
- Service Composition:
- Shufeng Huang, James Griffioen, and Kenneth L. Calvert, PVNs: Making Virtualized Network Infrastructure Usable,
Poster Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communication
Systems (ANCS ’12),
Austin, TX,
October 2012. DOI
- Abhishek Dwaraki and Tilman Wolf. Service instantiation in an internet with choices. In Proc. of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Nassau, Bahamas, August 2013. DOI
-
Shufeng Huang and James Griffioen,
Network Hypervisors: Managing the Emerging SDN Chaos,
International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2013) Track on Network
Architectures and Clean-Slate Designs (NACSD),
Nassau, Bahamas,
August 2013. DOI
-
Shufeng Huang, James Griffioen, Kenneth L. Calvert,
Network Hypervisors: Enhancing SDN Infrastructure,
Computer Communications,
Elsevier,
46(15):87–96,
June 2014. DOI
- Routing/Forwarding:
-
Onur Ascigil, Kenneth L. Calvert, and James N. Griffioen,
On the Scalability of Interdomain Path Computations,
IFIP Networking 2014 Conference,
Trondheim, Norway,
June 2014. DOI
- Interactive Gaming:
-
David Brown, Hussamuddin Nasir, Charles Carpenter, Onur Ascigil, James Griffioen, and Kenneth Calvert,
ChoiceNet Gaming: Changing the Gaming Experience with Economics,
19th International Conference on Computer Games (CGAMES 2014),
Louisville, KY,
July 2014. DOI
-
Shufeng Huang and James Griffioen,
HyperNet Games: Leveraging SDN Networks to Improve Multiplayer Online Games,
CGamesUSA 2013 - 18th International Conference on Computer Games,
Louisville, KY,
July 2013. DOI
-
Application of Service Choices:
- Luis Andres Marentes, Tilman Wolf, Anna Nagurney, and Yezid Donoso. Towards pricing mechanisms
for delay tolerant services. International Journal of Computers, Communications and Control,
11(1):77–89, February 2016. DOI
Team
The ChoiceNet project is lead by four institutions: the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Kentucky, North Carolina State University, and the Univeristy of North Carolina.
The principle investigators and co-principle investigators on the project are:
Graduate students on the project are:
- Onur Ascigil, University of Kentucky
- Shireesh Bhat, North Carolina State University
- Hao Cai, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Xinming Chen, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Abhishek Dwaraki, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Shufeng Huang, University of Kentucky
- Dong "Michelle" Li, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Sara Saberi, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Thiago Teixeira, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Code
There is no publicly available implementation of ChoiceNet, yet.
Developer link
Sponsor
The project is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1111040, 1111088, 1111256, 1111276.