Can high quality be provided economically for all transmissions on the Internet? Current work assumes that it cannot, and concentrates on providing differentiated service levels. However, an examination of patterns of use and economics of data networks suggests that providing enough bandwidth for uniformly high quality transmission may be practical. If this turns out not to be possible, only the simplest schemes that require minimal involvement by end users and network administrators are likely to be accepted. On the other hand, there are substantial inefficiencies in the current data networks, inefficiencies that can be alleviated even without complicated pricing or network engineering systems.

Differentiated services for the Internet are undergoing intensive development. It is widely accepted that they will require usage sensitive pricing. The Paris Metro Pricing (PMP) proposal is to rely on pricing alone to provide differentiated services. PMP is the simplest differentiated services system in terms of complexity.

The simple model on which the Internet has operated, with all packets treated equally, and charges only for access links to the network, has contributed to its explosive growth. However, there is wide dissatisfaction with the delays and losses in current transmission. Further, new services such as packet telephony require assurance of considerably better service. These factors have stimulated the development of methods for providing Quality of Service (QoS), and this will make the Internet more complicated. Differential quality will also force differential pricing, and this will further increase the complexity of the system. The solution of simply putting in more capacity is widely regarded as impractical. However, it appears that we are about to enter a period of rapidly declining transmission costs. The implications of such an environment are explored by considering models with two types of demands for data transport, differing in sensitivity to congestion. Three network configurati...

Surprisingly little is known about the Internet. Even such basic facts as the size of the networks that make up the Internet or the amount of traffic they carry are not available. This paper presents estimates of the main statistics about the size and growth of the Internet, as well as about utilization patterns. This data is then used to justify some speculative predictions about the likely evolution of data networks.

The Internet is the latest in a long succession of communication technologies. The goal of this work is to draw lessons from the evolution of all these services. Little attention is paid to technology as such, since that has changed radically many times. Instead, the stress is on the steady growth in volume of communication, the evolution in the type of traffic sent, the qualitative change this growth produces in how people treat communication, and the evolution of pricing. The focus is on the user, and in particular on how quality and price differentiation have been used by service providers to influence consumer behavior, and how consumers have reacted.

In the last few years there has been considerable research toward extending the Internet architecture to provide quality of service guarantees for the emerging realtime multimedia applications. QoS provision is a rather controversial endeavor. At one end of the spectrum there were proposals for reservations and per-flow state in the routers. These models did not flourish due to the network's heterogeneity, the complexity of the mechanisms involved, and scalability problems. At the other end, proposals advocating that an overprovisioned best effort network will solve all the problems are not quite convincing either. The authors believe that more control is clearly needed for protecting best effort service. An important requirement is to prevent congestion collapse, keep congestion levels low, and guarantee fairness. Appropriate control structures in a best effort service network could even be used for introducing differentiation. This could be achieved without sacrificing the...

The central issue of Internet economics is pricing. In [1], we studied the Internet pricing based on the leaderfollower game, the cooperative game, and the twoperson game theory. In this paper, we continue our study by comparing different pricing schemes with the above approaches. These schemes include Paris Metro Pricing (PMP) and pricing with priority. Weshowthat PMP does not provide better social welfare thus does not provide better cooperative solutions. Numerical examples indicate that the leader-follower game leads to an optimal solution with the same price for both "classes" of users in PMP. This contradicts to the intention of the original design of the scheme.

We consider a queue with finite buffer where the buffer size limits the amount of work that can be stored in the queue. The arrival process is a Poisson or a Markov modulated Poisson process. The service times (packet lengths) are iid with a general distribution. Our queue models the systems in the Internet more realistically than the usual M/GI/1/K queue which restricts the number of packets in the buffer rather than the buffer content (the number of bits). We obtain the stability, the rates of convergence to the stationary distribution and functional limit theorems for this system. In addition we also obtain algorithms to compute the stationary density of the workload process, the waiting times and the probability of packet loss. Next we study the queue with two priority classes. The higher priority traffic has preemptive-resume priority. For sharing the buffer we consider two cases. In the first case the buffer is shared by both the classes without any priority. In the second case the buffer...

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Prakash, Bhanu (M.S., IPv6 [Interdisciplinary Telecommunication Program]) Using the 20 bit Flow Label Field in the IPv6 header to indicate desirable Quality of Service on the Internet Thesis directed by Associate Professor Douglas C. Sicker The traditional Internet as designed in the early 1970s was aimed primarily for packet transmission over a switched network. Delay, latency, bandwidth, packet loss and jitter on the network were factors that were not considered to be of much importance when the initial simple networks were built. Due to the complexity of present day applications and communication needs, the above factors which influence the quality of communications bear a lot of significance. The present work proposes an efficient scheme to use the 20 bits of the IPv6 flow label field to indicate the desirable Quality of Service parameters on the Internet. iii

. Costs of communications networks are determined by the maximal capacities of those networks. On the other hand, the traffic those networks carry depends on how heavily those networks are used. Hence utilization rates and utilization patterns determine the costs of providing services, and therefore are crucial in understanding the economics of communications networks. A comparison of utilization rates and costs of various networks helps disprove many popular myths about the Internet. Although packet networks are often extolled for the efficiency of their transport, it often costs more to send data over internal corporate networks than using modems on the switched voice network. Packet networks are growing explosively not because they utilize underlying transport capacity more efficiently, but because they provide much greater flexibility in offering new services. Study of utilization patterns shows there are large opportunities for increasing the efficiency of data transport and mak...