Achieving Good End-to-End Service Using Bill-Pay

Over the past couple of decades, the Internet has rapidly evolved from a collaborative social experiment to an agglomerate of competing commercial providers. This shift has helped maintain growth and has turned the Internet into a vast economic force, but it has also introduced some serious problems. A particularly bad problem is the inability of end-users to obtain the desired levels of performance for their transfers. Today, an organization can set up a contract with its ISP to ensure that the ISP offers good service to its traffic. But typical transfers in the Internet traverse multiple ISPs and it is clearly infeasible for the organization to have contracts with all of them. It is possible for neighboring ISPs to enter into contracts that require them to offer good performance to each other’s “premium” traffic. However, such contracts are extremely rare and, even when used, cannot guarantee good end-to-end service to user transfers. Our thesis in this paper is that we can support good end-to-end service to user transfers by extending the current model of binding bi-lateral contracts between neighboring entities (e.g. customers and providers or peering partners) with simple mechanisms that produce tacit incentives for remote ISPs. Our use of the phrase “good end-to-end service” is intentional: our goal is not to offer “end-to-end QoS” with strict performance guarantees, but rather to provide end users the flexibility to improve the performance experienced by their transfers, as and when desired. Our proposal builds on two main end-user based mechanisms that generate the tacit incentives.