Economic Traffic Management: Mechanisms and Applications

Abstract

The paradigm shift from centralized services into hundreds of thousands of decentralized services changes traffic directions and patterns in the Internet. In that light, overlay providers form logical communication topologies, which effect the underlying telcos’ as well as Internet Service Providers’ (ISP) traffic and network management. Thus, Economic Traffic Management (ETM) principles deal with incentives, decentralized traffic generation, and modern applications, such as integrated Video-on-Demand and live streaming approaches. Therefore, this work overviews the very recent work on ETM mechanisms, especially driven by the SmoothIT project, and on LiveShift, combining efficiently architectural and system demands for an incentive-driven application management. Furthermore, this section describes in examples, provides evidences, and concludes that ETM and LiveShift can pave an efficient path to modern application support of distributed overlay traffic management, which benefits telcos, ISPs, overlay providers, and end users, if all or parts of them see the right incentives to cooperate, behave well, or interact.