The Economy Plane: Igniting Innovation in the Internet

Recent trends in technology and network use have pushed the capabilities required of the Internet beyond what the current infrastructure can provide. To address these limitations, the network community has developed a variety of technologies that can be used to support new and enhanced network services. A critical question that remains unanswered is how to get users and service providers to adopt and embrace these new technologies and resulting services. Sincemarket forces have a drastic effect on the shape of services and applications deployed and used in the network, our work proposes an economy plane for the Internet. Our economy plane is based on two main concepts: (1) services that can be offered and sold in a marketplace and that can be used to compose more complex service offerings, and (2) contracts that reflect the economic relationships between entities participating in the Internet. By automating the instantiation of services and the setup of contracts, these operations can take place at short time scales and thus allow users to take advantage of market forces. Due to increased competition among providers, we expect reduced vertical integration and the quick deployment of novel networking technology throughout the network. We describe the architectural design of our economy plane, and provide examples of how to implement various aspects of the economy plane in practice.