Dynamic Internet Pricing with Service Level Agreements for Clients with Multi-ISP Connections ...

160 Pages·2016·6.24 MB·English

Dynamic Internet Pricing with Service Level
Agreements for Clients with Multi-ISP Connections
A Thesis Submitted
for the award of the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
by
Rohit Tripathi
Under the guidance of
Prof. Gautam Barua
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology
Guwahati-781039, Assam, India
April 2016
TH-1482_08610101
Statement
I do hereby declare that the matter embodied in this thesis is the result of investi-
gations carried out by me in the department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, under the supervision of Prof. Gau-
tam Barua.
In keeping with the general practice of reporting scientific observations, due ac-
knowledgments have been made wherever the work described is based on the finding
of other investigators.
Rohit Tripathi
April, 2016 Research Scholar,
Guwahati Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Assam, India Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
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Certificate
This is to certify that the work described in this thesis entitled “Dynamic Internet
Pricing with Service Level Agreements for Clients with Multi-ISP Con-
nections” submitted by Rohit Tripathi, a research scholar in the department of
Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, for the
award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, is a record of an original research
work carried out by him under my supervision and guidance. The thesis has fulfilled
all requirement as per the regulations of the institute. The results embodied in this
thesis have not been submitted to any other university or institute for the award of
any degree or diploma.
Gautam Barua
April, 2016 Professor,
Guwahati Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Assam, India Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
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Acknowledgment
I thank everyone who has helped or influenced me during the PhD duration. It is
however not possible to mention everyone in this limited space. I thank my PhD
supervisor, Prof. Gautam Barua for providing guidance and advises. He suggested
goodresearchideas; improvementsandextensionsofmyresearchideas; andprovided
guidance in every phase of PhD.
Ithankmyinstitute, IITGuwahatiforprovidingthenecessaryresourcesfordoing
research. The institute provided me access to online research libraries such as IEEE,
ACM, Springer, etc. I was able to download almost all the research papers that I
needed for my research. Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department, IIT
Guwahati provided me access to high performance server for running simulations and
this saved a lot of time.
I thank funding agencies for providing me financial support during the PhD du-
ration. MHRD provided me scholarship for five years. After the completion of the
scholarshipduration, ourCSEdepartmentarrangedscholarshipforsomemonthsand
then my supervisor arranged funding for remaining duration from one of his projects.
I thank my parents for their support and patience during the PhD duration. I
thank my friends for making the PhD duration comfortable.
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Abstract
One of the most important inventions which has revolutionized the way of living
and working of people is the internet. The increase in internet coverage and the
decrease in internet access price has resulted in demand for a good internet service.
Clients want some guarantee in internet access quality. In this thesis, we present a
modelinwhichclientsareguaranteedconnectionandbandwidthandifclientsdonot
get the service they request, the service provider pays a penalty to the clients. We
consider a system where each client has access to multiple internet service providers
(ISP) and can choose one of them to connect to based on the prices being offered
by the ISPs. When a client arrives, an ISP has to decide whether to accept the
client, and the price to charge from the client for the duration of its connection.
Rejection of a client results in a penalty and delay in getting requested bandwidth
while connected also incurs a penalty. We assume a Poisson arrival process with
the rate of arrival sensitive to the price being charged. While connected, a client
sometimesremainidleandsometimesconsumesbandwidth; andboththesedurations
are exponentially distributed. A service provider tries to maximize its income by
charging appropriate prices based on its current state and deciding whether to accept
more clients or not. Since penalties are imposed, such solutions also automatically
balanceloadamongserviceproviders,andsothequalityofservicetoclientsimproves.
We first present a solution to obtain Nash equilibrium between two ISPs. We then
present a solution that maximizes the steady state income of service providers. As
the computational complexity of this solution is high, we propose two approximate
solutions. The solutions are then compared using simulation. Simulation results
show that our solutions, including the approximate solutions, significantly improve
quality of service of clients and increase the income of service providers as compared
to a simple heuristic based solution that otherwise could to be used.
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