Title: Trade and Cap: A Customer-Managed, Market-Based System for Trading Bandwidth Allowances at a Shared Link

Authors: Jorge Londono, Azer Bestavros, and Nikolaos Laoutaris

Date: July 29, 2009


Abstract: 

We propose "Trade and Cap" (TC), an economics-inspired mechanism that
incentivizes users to voluntarily coordinate their consumption of the
bandwidth of a shared resource (e.g., a DSLAM link) so as to converge
on what they perceive to be an equitable allocation, while ensuring
efficient resource utilization.  Under TC, rather than acting as an
arbiter, an ISP acts as an enforcer of what the community of rational
users sharing the resource decides is a fair allocation of that
resource.  Our TC mechanism proceeds in two phases. In the first,
users engage in a strategic trading game in which each user agent
selfishly chooses bandwidth slots to reserve in support of primary,
interactive network usage activities. In the second phase, each user
is allowed to acquire additional bandwidth slots in support of
presumed open-ended need for fluid bandwidth, catering to secondary
applications. The acquisition of this fluid bandwidth is subject to
the remaining "buying power" of each user and by prevalent "market
prices" -- both of which are determined by the results of the trading
phase and a desirable aggregate cap on link utilization. We present
analytical results that establish the underpinnings of our TC
mechanism, including game-theoretic results pertaining to the trading
phase, and pricing of fluid bandwidth allocation pertaining to the
capping phase. Using real network traces, we present extensive
experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of our scheme,
which we also show to be practical by highlighting the salient
features of an efficient implementation architecture. While our focus
in this paper is on the rational coordination of the shared use of a
DSLAM link, we also establish the generality of our TC mechanism by
presenting a number of other direct applications, ranging from
coordination of energy-aware task schedules to coordination of ISP
uplink bandwidth consumption.