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Talk on Research on Internet Transport Economics by Assoc. Prof. Richard Ma from National University of Singapore

We are pleased to announce the following talk by Prof. Richard Ma from National University of Singapore.
You are very welcome to join us.

Title:

Research on Internet Transport Economics

Abstract:

With the rise of video streaming and cloud services, the Internet has evolved into a content-centric service platform. Due to the best-effort service model of the Internet, the quality of service (QoS) of Internet services however cannot be guaranteed.
Furthermore, characterizing QoS is challenging since it depends on the autonomous business decisions such as capacity planning, routing strategies and peering agreements of network providers. To quantify the QoS for Internet-based services, we regard the Internet infrastructure as a transport system for data packets and study the Internet ecosystem and the economics of transport services collectively provided by the autonomous network providers.
In contrast to the traditional transport economics that studies the movement of people and goods over space and time, our focus in the Internet transport economics is the movement of streams of data packets that create information services. In particular, we model the supply of network capacities and demands of throughput driven by network protocols and establish a macroscopic network equilibrium under which both the end-to-end delays and drop rates of Internet routes can be derived.
We show that this equilibrium solution always exists and its uniqueness can be guaranteed under various realistic scenarios. We analyze the impacts of user demands and resource capacities on the network equilibrium and provide implications of Netflix-Comcast type of peering on the QoS of users. We demonstrate that our framework can be used as a building block to understand the routing strategies under a Wardrop equilibrium and to enable further studies such as Internet peering and in-network caching.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Richard T. B. Ma
Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, National University of Singapore

Richard T. B. Ma received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in computer science and M.Phil. degree in computer science and engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 2010. During his Ph.D. study, he worked as a Research Intern at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA, and Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain. From 2010-2014, he worked as a Research Scientist at the Advanced Digital Science Center (ADSC), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA. He is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. His current research interests include distributed systems and network economics. He was a recipient of the Best Paper Award Runners-up from the ACM Mobihoc 2020 and a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award from the IEEE IC2E 2013, the IEEE ICNP 2014, and the IEEE Workshop on Smart Data Pricing 2015. He is a Senior Member of ACM and IEEE.