Toronto Networking Seminar

We give an overview of network neutrality issues. Using a common, simple quadratic revenue model, we study the outcomes of different games involving access providers (ISPs) and content providers. We consider side payments between these two different types of providers and a  simple customer loyalty model when more than one provider of a given type is in play. A kind of paradox of side payments is demonstrated wherein the receiving party actually has lower revenue at Nash equilibrium compared to the system without side payments. Finally, we  consider two different sub-types of content providers in order to explore application neutrality issues.

This work in collaboration with E. Altman, P. Bernhard, S. Caron, J. Rojas-Mora, and S. Wong. This work supported in part by NSF.

George Kesidis obtained his PhD in EECS at the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. From 1992-2000 he taught in the ECE Dept at the University of Waterloo. He is now professor of CSE and EE at the  Pennsylvania State University. His research spans different areas of communication networking including security, economics, traffic engineering, modeling and performance evaluation. He is also interested  in queueing, stochastic optimization and machine learning. He was TPC co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2007, and currently serves as associate editor of IEEE COMST. He is a senior member of the IEEE.