Internet Design Principles for Economic Traffic Management

Traditional traffic management techniques employed by Internet Service Providers (ISP) cannot successfully deal with the increasingly high volumes of overlay traffic and lead both overlay and underlay to sub-optimal behavior. Individual optimizations as performed on each different layer result in low Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for the overlay users and, therefore, limited business opportunities for the Overlay Providers (OP) as well as high interconnection charges for the ISPs. A solution to this problem is Economic Traffic Management (ETM), an incentive-based approach, which employs economic concepts and mechanisms and promotes cross-layer cooperation in order to deal with the overlay traffic and lead to a beneficial situation for all (Future) Internet stakeholders. In order for the ETM framework to be successfully employed, current Internet design principles should be revisited and new ones need to be defined to meet Future Internet’s requirements. In particular, these new Internet design principles that will help to define the Future Internet’s architecture include the promotion of cooperation between different layers and players, and the information exchange between them.