Internet Service Provider (ISP) peering has emerged as one of the most important and effective ways for ISPs to improve the efficiency of operation. Peering is defined as “an interconnection business relationship whereby ISPs provide connectivity to each others’ transit customers.” ISPs seek peering relationships primarily for two reasons. First, peering decreases the cost and reliance on purch...

In October, 2006 Bell Aliant, the primary provider of telephone and internet services in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, experienced a small fire in a building which housed both its main system and back-up system. As a result, both systems were disabled. Consequently, the capital city, St. John’s was left without telephone, cell phone, internet service and most incredibly wit...

In this paper, we present a multi-criteria decision aid methodology optimizing the performance of Service Provider Agents in a Virtual Private Network, according to the Specifications posed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). We enhance the basic protocol steps for a service brokering procedure, and apply the methodology to a specific case of Network Providers: the Interne...

This note is concerned with the issue of sidepayments between content providers (CPs) and Internet service providers (ISPs) in a potentially not-neutral Internet. Previously, we found that side-payments were not profitable under communal demand response for different types of providers. Here, we consider different (though coupled) linear demand response to usage based prices applied by each pro...

A growing number of organizations consider the use of Internet services as an important part of their future business activities. Especially smaller or medium sized enterprises (SMEs) could spread their business activities using the Internet. One of the greatest restricting problems for the commercial use of the Internet is security. In particular, the secure connection of local area and organi...

1 There are two basic types of interconnection agreements between providers in the Internet: peering and transit. A decision every Internet network service provider (INSP) has to make is which other peering/transit INSPs to connect with. The potential peering/transit partners differ (obviously) in the advertised routes and they may differ quite drastically in the amount and type of costs (line ...

In the past twenty years, the multi-agent technology has been widely employed for developing agent-based systems. Currently, agent-based service-oriented applications have been widely applied in many complex domains such as e-markets, grid computing, e-governments and service-oriented software systems, across Internet and organizations. In this kind of service-oriented multi-agent systems, serv...

Correctness verification of query results is a significant challenge in database outsourcing. Most of the proposed approaches impose high overhead, which makes them impractical in real scenarios. Probabilistic approaches are proposed in order to reduce the computation overhead pertaining to the verification process. In this paper, we use the notion of trust as the basis of our probabilistic app...

Inspired by new developments in dynamic spectrum access, we study the dynamic pricing of wireless internet access when demand and capacity (i.e., available bandwidth) are both stochastic. The demand for wireless internet access has increased enormously in recent years. However, the spectrum available to wireless service providers is limited. The industry has thus expanded conventional license-b...

The European Regulator Group (ERG) defines Bitstream Access Service as a wholesale service offered by a broadband network operator with significant market power to an Internet Service Provider, and identifies it as a market subject to regulation. This paper develops a cost model for the Bitstream Access Service under xDSL technology, following the recommendations of the ERG, considering differe...