Editorial to the special issue on Economic Traffic Management

Economic perspectives in network management have recently attracted a high level of attention, especially due to the fact that network management tasks have become very complex, now optimizing various dimensions of a network’s operation in which multiple stakeholders are involved. Route optimizations, Quality-of-Service (QoS) provisioning, and traffic management determine a few of these often conflicting dimensions. In view of the dramatic increase of overlay traffic, driven among others by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, more traditional optimizations now tend to be superseded by economically driven traffic management solutions. Such solutions are especially suitable to cases involving millions of individual users injecting traffic into the networks of multiple interacting network service providers, acting on different tiers and pursuing different incentives. Owing to the decentralization of these players and to the commercialization of service offerings, an economically driven approach often is scalable and offers a wider range of interesting alternatives for optimization, traffic management, network management, and dealing with respective legal views in general. Moreover, it allows for the system to reach a viable equilibrium, where each of the players still pursues his own interests and no further coordination has to be assumed. Thus the major goal of this Special Issue of the International Journal of Network Management on Economic Traffic Management (ETM) is to present innovative approaches and solutions to economically driven management tasks, with a selected emphasis on economic traffic management questions and auxiliary aspects. Those aspects relate physical network domains to application characteristics in order to enable efficient and decentralized decision making as well as operation involving optimized data transfer. ETM is a more recent approach to influence the transport of Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams. While the application of such decentralized and scalable economic principles has been studied in a number of international research initiatives and projects (most notably those that specified and analyzed variations of locality awareness), ETM as a framework was defined and studied by the European project ‘Simple Economic Management Approaches of Overlay Traffic in Heterogeneous Internet Topologies’ (SmoothIT). SmoothIT also classified and outlined the major theoretical as well as practical challenges and constraints of such ETM applications for overlay traffic for both the major cases of P2P-based file sharing and video streaming applications. Moreover, the European COST Action IS0605 ‘Econ@Tel—A Telecommunications Economics COST Network’ addresses in a dedicated working group on ‘Network Management Architectures and Economics’ such aspects too, and the ‘Socio-Economics Service for European Research Projects’ (SESERV) generalizes the tussles approach to address socio-economic aspects as well.