Assessment of Economic Management of Overlay Traffic: Methodology and Results

Overlay applications generate huge amounts of traffic in the Internet, which determines a problem for Internet Service Providers, since it results in high charges for inter-domain traffic. Traditional traffic management techniques cannot deal successfully with overlay traffic. An incentive-based approach that employs economic concepts and mechanisms is required in order to deal with the overlay traffic in a way that is mutually beneficial for all stakeholders of the Future Internet. This "TripleWin" situation is the target of Economic Traffic Management (ETM). A wide variety of techniques are employed by ETM for optimizing overlay traffic management considering performance requirements of overlay and underlay networks together with cost implications for ISPs. However, the assessment of ETM requires an innovative methodology. In this article this methodology is described and major results are presented as obtained accordingly from the evaluation of different ETM mechanisms.