Flux Research Group / School of Computing

Mercado: Using market principles to drive alternative network service abstractions

Xu Chen, Jeffrey Erman, Seungjoon Lee, and Jacobus (Kobus) Van der Merwe

Capacity Sharing Workshop (CSWS) @ ACM CoNEXT (CSWS) 2012.

areas
Mobile Networking

abstract

 In this paper we propose the Mercado architecture as a vehicle to use economic incentives and the sophisticated capabilities of modern mobile networks and devices to change the mobile networking service abstraction to better utilize networking resources. Our proposed architecture generalizes to enable rich interaction and information exchange between mobile devices and the network. However, as a first step we focus our efforts on the scenario where a mobile device with non-real time network workload, would interact with the network to explore the financial incentives available if it were to delay using the network. Combining the network response with knowledge of the application semantics allows the application to perform its own economic vs utility tradeoff.

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In this paper we propose the Mercado architecture as a vehicle to use economic incentives and the sophisticated capabilities of modern mobile networks and devices to change the mobile networking service abstraction to better utilize networking resources. Our proposed architecture generalizes to enable rich interaction and information exchange between mobile devices and the network. However, as a first step we focus our efforts on the scenario where a mobile device with non-real time network workload, would interact with the network to explore the financial incentives available if it were to delay using the network. Combining the network response with knowledge of the application semantics allows the application to perform its own economic vs utility tradeoff.