An Economic Traffic Management Approach to Enable the TripleWin for Users, ISPs, and Overlay Providers

Socio-economic aspects play an increasingly important role in the Future Internet. To enable a TripleWin situation for the involved players, i.e. the end users, the ISPs and telecommunication operators, and the service providers, a new, incentive-based concept is proposed referred to as Economic Traffic Management (ETM). It aims at reducing costs within the network while improving the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for end users. In particular, peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay applications generate a large amount of costs due to inter-domain traffic. ETM solution approaches have to take into account (a) the traffic patterns stemming from the overlay application, (b) the charging models for transit traffic, and (c) the applicability and efficiency of the proposed solution. The complex interaction between these three components and its consequences is demonstrated on selected examples. As a result it is shown that different ETM approaches have to be combined for an overall solution. To this end, the paper derives functional and non-functional requirements for designing ETM and provides a suitable architecture enabling the implementation of a TripleWin solution.