UC Santa Cruz

Background:

The Market Enabling Network Architecture project is funded by the NSF Future Internet Design (FIND) program. The project is collaborative between UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. Our objective is to study how the future Internet can be designed to enable markets for service quality and security.

Principal Investigators:

John Musacchio (UCSC)

Jean Walrand (UCB)

Venkat Ananthram (UCB)

Links:
UC Berkeley Market Enabling Network Architecture Home Page

Project Summary Document (1 page pdf)

Project Description Document (15 page pdf)

What follows is a survey of some of the research questions we are studying.

Service Choice:

Today, service quality is often not dependable enough for critical real time applications. Even if one is willing to pay more for better service, today’s network makes it difficult or impossible to do.

Idea: Users offered real-time choice: “red” and “blue” · “red” and “blue” not specified to users in detail;

“red” and “blue” not specified to users in detail;
Users decide based on which they think gives better performance.
Market will push providers to make improvements, and offer services more suitable for intensive real-time applications.
No need to dictate QoS parameters a “standard.” Let the market decide!

For more discussion see:

J. Musacchio, S. Wu, “The Price of Anarchy in a Network Pricing Game,” 45th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication and Control, Monticello, IL, September 2007. [Talk]

J. Musacchio, J. Walrand, S. Wu, "A Game Theoretic Model for Network Upgrade Decisions," 44th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication and Control, Monticello, IL, September 2006, pp 191- 200. [Talk]

Network Neutrality:

One key question of the network neutrality debate is whether ISPs should be allowed to charge content providers that are not directly connected to them. Issues and questions that arise include:

Would allowing ISP 2 to charge Content Provider A encourage 2 to invest more? Would it discourage content providers investment?
Which regime is better for users?
What features (if any) should new Internet have to enable revenue sharing between content and transit providers?

For more discussion see:

J. Musacchio, G. Schwartz, J. Walrand “Network Neutrality and Provider Investment Incentives,” Submitted to Review of Network Economics (Sept. 2007).

Markets for Security:

Idea: Use power of markets to improve network security.
Example:

Users pay to be certified by a Certification Agency (CA):

CA takes on liability for attacks traced back to user:

- CA incentivized to encourage users to take due care:

For more discussion see:

P. Honeyman, G. Schwartz, “Interdependence of Reliability and Security,” Workshop on Economics of Information Security, CMU, June 2007.

Earlier related work on markets for Wi-Fi access:

J. Musacchio, J. Walrand, “WiFi Access Point Pricing as a Dynamic Game,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol.14, no.2, April 2006, pp. 289-301.

Earlier versions of this work appeared as:

J. Musacchio, J. Walrand, “WiFi Access Point Pricing as a Dynamic Game,” Proceedings Seventh INFORMS Telecommunications Conference, Boca Raton, Florida, March 2004.

J. Musacchio, J. Walrand, “Game Theoretic Modeling of WiFi Pricing,” 41st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication and Control, Monticello, IL, October 2003. [slides]

Contact:
John Musacchio
Technology and Information Management
University of California, Santa Cruz
1156 High Street, SOE 3
Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077

Email:       johnm@soe.ucsc.edu
Cell:          (510) 501-2817
Fax:          (831) 459-4829