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Projet d’ARC INRIA 2011-2012
MENEUR
Modélisation en Economie des réseaux et NEUtRalité du
Net
Network Economics and Net Neutrality Modeling
EPI INRIA :
Dionysos, Maestro, Mescal and P. Bernhard
Other academic partners:
Telecom Bretagne, FTW, Columbia University, Pennsylvania State University
Industrial partners:
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Orange Labs
Leader: Bruno Tuffin (Dionysos)
Abstract
The goal of this project is to study the interest of network neutrality, a topic that
has recently gained a lot of attention. The project aims at elaborating mathematical
models that will be analyzed to investigate its impact on users, on social welfare and
on providers’ investment incentives, among others, and eventually propose how (and
if) network neutrality should be implemented. It brings together experts from different
scientific fields, telecommunications, applied mathematics, economics, mixing academy
and industry, to discuss those issues. It is a first step towards the elaboration of a
European project.
Contents
1 Participants 3
1.1 EPI Dionysos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 EPI Maestro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3 EPI Mescal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Pierre Bernhard (DR INRIA, member of EPI Comore) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.5 GET/Telecom Bretagne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.6 FTW, Vienna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
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1.7 Columbia University, USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.8 Pennsylvania State University, USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.9 Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France, Semantic and Autonomous Technologies
(SAT) department . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.10 Orange Labs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2 Scientific goals 5
2.1 Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Description of activities and respective goals of participants . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.1 What should be a good definition/implementation of network neutrality? 7
2.2.2 Who brings the most added-value, and who should pay the other in a
non-neutral network? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.2.3 What is the impact of neutrality on network investments? . . . . . . . 8
2.2.4 What is the impact of non-neutrality on (content) innovation? . . . . 9
2.2.5 Shall we (at least) allow service differentiation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.3 Expected results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.4 State of the art and positioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3 Financial appendix 11
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1 Participants
1.1 EPI Dionysos
Involved : Bruno Tuffin (CR INRIA), Hai Tran Hoang (PhD student), Jean-Marc Vigne
(PhD student).
Dionysos is a group working on the identification, the conception and the selection of the
most appropriate network architectures of a communication service. Dionysos has acquired
an expertise in the area of telecommunication networks pricing, a topic on which the group
has been deeply involved for the past eight years, participating in (or leading) many projects
at the French and European levels. We can especially remark that the group is currenty
leading an ANR project on (economic) competition among providers (see http://captures.
inria.fr and, among references, [12, 13]), a problem for which network neutrality is a new
key component.
The group will bring this expertise on the mathematical modeling of pricing schemes
and of competition among providers.
1.2 EPI Maestro
Involved : Eitan Altman (DR INRIA), S. Wong (PhD Student in Law).
Maestro is a group working on methods and tools for the performance evaluation, optimization
and control of networks. The people involved in the project are more specifically
international actors in the theory and application of game theory in telecommunication networks.
The group will therefore bring this expertise to the project, game theory being the
fundamental tool to analyze the interactions between the economic players depending on
whether network neutrality is or is not applied.
Note that network neutrality is an important part of a new topic in Maestro named
“Access to knowledge and culture: The interplay between legislation, Economics and information
technology” led by Eitan Altman for two years (see http://www-sop.inria.fr/
members/Eitan.Altman/accessF.html).
S. Wong will bring her knowledge on the law aspect to the project.
1.3 EPI Mescal
Involved: Bruno Gaujal (DR INRIA), Corinne Touati (CR INRIA)
Mescal is a group working on the efficient design of large scale distributed systems.
Mescal has been investigating the establishment of virtual prices, also called shadow prices
in congestion networks. These prices ensure a rational use of resources. Equilibria can also
be improved by advising policies to mobiles such that any user that does not follow these
pieces of advice will necessarily penalize herself (correlated equilibria). Mescal members
are leading the selfnets action de recherche within the joint laboratory between INRIA and
Alcatel-Lucent on self-optimizing networks. In this ARC project, Mescal members will especially
focus on non-symmetrical price problems and the algorithmic issues (synchronization,
available information, time and memory complexity).
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1.4 Pierre Bernhard (DR INRIA, member of EPI Comore)
Pierre Bernhard brings his expertise in game theory, and more specifically in dynamic games,
Wardrop equilibria, E.S.S. and evolutionary games.
Pierre Bernhard will intervene in the project at a personal level (as an Emeritus DR
INRIA), since his EPI INRIA Comore does not work on telecommunications.
1.5 GET/Telecom Bretagne
Involved : Patrick Maillé (MdC).
The member of this engineering school has developed an expertise in the domain of
network pricing and game theory since 2002. He has also spent 6 months in 2006 at the
Columbia Business School (Columbia University, New York, USA) to work with Nicolas
Stier-Moses, who has also recently started an activity on network neutrality in the USA.
Patrick Maillé is also a member of ANR Captures project interested in this topic, and will
help for the discussion and collaboration with Columbia University.
1.6 FTW, Vienna
Involved : Peter Reichl, Ivan Gojmerac (key researchers).
FTW (Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien) is a Telecommunications Research
Center in Vienna, funded half by the government and half by Industry. The participants in
MENEUR project are key researchers in this institute working on future telecommunication
ecosystems (an ecosystem is defined as a community of organisms together with their environment,
viewed as a system of interactions and interdependent relationships). The network
neutrality issue is at the heart of telecommunication ecosystems.
FTW will bring to the project the point of view of another European country, their
knowledge on the feasibility from the technological point of view, as well as of a European
operator as consultants for Telecom Austria.
1.7 Columbia University, USA
Nicolas Stier-Moses (Associate Professor)
Professor Stier’s research focuses on the study of the impact that self-minded agents have
on decentralized systems. In particular, his goal is to explore mechanisms that can help align
the incentive of agents and result in efficient outcomes. He is trained as a mathematician,
computer scientist and operations researcher, and has since specialized in game theoretic
models. He developed a strong interest in telecommunication networks since his first visit
to INRIA Rennes in 1998. After that, he visited INRIA multiples times and continued to do
research in this application domain. Recently, he wrote a number of research and outreach
articles about network neutrality to highlight how considering investment decisions and
competition might influence the choice of policy.
This collaboration will bring the North-American point of view to the project.
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1.8 Pennsylvania State University, USA
George Kesidis (Full Professor)
Professor Kesidis’ research is about modeling and performance evaluation of communication
and computer networking mechanisms, scheduling and routing, Internet security and
more importantly for the project, network economics and games. He has already started
an activity around network neutrality and initiated a collaboration on this issue with EPI
Maestro as illustrated by publication [2]. He will also bring the North-American point of
view to the project.
1.9 Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France, Semantic and Autonomous
Technologies (SAT) department
Hélia Pouyllau (Research Engineer)
The SAT department of Alcatel-Lucent Bell France focuses on issues in carrier-grade
networking, tackling 3 topics of research: network as a service (NaaS), self-* management
and traffic-aware routing. The NaaS research activity regroups problematic on metro network
issues, delivering QoS across networks and Internet evolutions. The SAT department
leads the European Project ETICS on economic and technical problems in inter-carrier service
delivery. In the past, they also participated to the French ANR ACTRICE and have
published several papers addressing both economic and technical dimensions of the topic.
ALBLF will bring its expertise on Internet economics and network interconnection architectures
in order to validate the models and solutions proposed by the partners.
1.10 Orange Labs
Orange Labs will bring the point of view of an operator to the project.
2 Scientific goals
2.1 Context
In the current Internet business model, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) charge both endusers
and content providers directly connected to them. ISPs generally have public peering or
transit (i.e. customer-provider relation) agreements among them but do not charge content
providers that are associated with other ISPs. These agreements structure the Internet in a
Tiers architecture at the top of which “Tier 1” operators dominate the market. Nevertheless,
there is now an increasing traffic asymmetry between ISPs, mainly due to some prominent
and resource consuming content providers. The typical example is YouTube (owned by
Google), accessed by all users while hosted by a single Tier 1 ISP, whose traffic constitutes
now a non-negligible part of the whole Internet traffic. This issue has been the starting
point of the debate launched at the end of 2005, by Ed Whitacre (CEO of AT&T) saying
that content providers should be charged by ISPs they are not directly connected to:
How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe.
Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is
use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this
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capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some
mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re
using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free
in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and
for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for]
free is nuts.
The underlying concern is that investment is made by ISPs but content providers have
an important part of the dividends. The revenue arising from online advertising (meaning
showing graphical ads on regular web pages) is estimated at approximately a $24 billion
in 2009 [6] while textual ads on search pages has led to a combined revenue $8.5 billion in
2007 [9], those figures increasing every year. Meanwhile, transit prices - which constitutes
the main source of revenues for transit ISPs - are decreasing and predicted to be under 1$
per Mbps by 2014. ISPs argue that there is no sufficient incentive for them to continue to
invest on the network infrastructures if most benefits come to content providers.
Another option, if no charging to content providers is implemented by ISPs, is to lower
the quality of the traffic coming from distant content providers. As an illustration, this has
been the topic of a new controversy in 2007 when Comcast, a main ISP in the USA, started
(as an extreme case) blocking P2P applications such as BitTorrent, using the argument that
P2P is mostly used to share illegal content. Advocates of neutrality argued here that P2P
has legitimate uses and other types of initiatives should be imagined.
In both cases, the goal of ISPs is to change the current behavior of the Internet, where
all users (of whatever type) have a full access to the network with the same quality at a
flat-rate fee.
This has led to a lot of protests from content providers and user associations arguing
that charging for content or blocking types of flow is an impingement of freedom of speech
[17] and/or human rights that will impact the network development. We want to investigate
the relevance of arguments from both sides and see if service differentiation should
be allowed, and if yes, at which level and how far they should be implemented. This issue
has already been a subject of debate at the law and policy makers level. In the US the
trend was first to go with imposing network regulation on ISPs to ensure neutrality, but it
is not clear who, if any, has the authority to regulate the Internet (for instance the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) lost a lawsuit where the supreme court found that they
lack the authority). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released in 2007 a report not
supporting neutrality constraints, increasing the debate at the political level. This debate
is also active in Europe and in France, as illustrated by the open consultation on network
neutrality launched in 2010. In its response to the consultation, the French regulation authority,
ARCEP, has published a proposal intending to define how net neutrality could be
implemented. Among these proposals, some of them catch our attention: i) ISPs should
respect the neutrality between applications but should be let free to operate in an efficient
manner their network, ii) the efficient management of a network should be made at the
detriment of best-effort services, and iii) interconnection contracts should be more transparent.
This latter is a clear reference to the emergence of private peering agreements which
are constituting some kind of private routes within the Internet and might led to create a
parallel “premium“ Internet.
Network neutrality also brings some questions at the technological level, highlighting the
multidisciplinary aspect of the issue. Service differentiation has indeed been the subject of a
vast literature in the last decade to cope with the congestion encountered in access networks,
in wireless ones for instance, but not only. This has led to the proposition of architectures
such as DiffServ (for Differentiation of Service) that discriminate packets according to the
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type of application they are associated with. The principle is that some applications may
accomodate a worse quality of service in terms of delay, loss or other characteristics, and
this could be used towards a better experienced overall service. Network neutrality therefore
brings the question about whether or not this type of differentiation at the application
type level, not between content providers, should be applied. There is indeed a difference
between user (and/or content providers) discrimination and service differentiation that network
neutrality issue is raising. The notion of “fair” discrimination, between applications
and/or between users is subject to controversy.
The project is a follow-up to the response from INRIA researchers to the french consultation
on network neutrality [1] where they have exposed their ideas and posed the questions
that constitute in most part this proposal.
2.2 Description of activities and respective goals of participants
The goal of this ARC proposal is to model the economic relationships between end-users,
ISPs and content providers, and analyze the impact of non-neutrality versus neutrality.
The entire debate has raised a number of unanswered questions. The main (but nonexhaustive
list of) questions we aim at answering are described below. The complementarity
of the groups involved in the project, in terms of technological, economical, legal and mathematical
knowledge will foster the discussions on the models and their analysis. In all cases,
the models will be solved via game-theoretic tools that capture the interactions between
different actors.
2.2.1 What should be a good definition/implementation of network neutrality?
There is no very clear view of what network neutrality is. Our goal in this part would be to
bring an acceptable definition that will be validated by our models in terms of social welfare
(social welfare measuring the total level of satisfactions of all actors, ISPs, content providers
and end-users). In other words, we will study the impact of various definitions of neutrality
on social welfare and other objective functions, and consider a satisfactory one at this level.
The point of views of all partners from different fields (mathematics, telecommunications,
economics, law) and with different perspectives (academic, ISP, content provider or network
architects) will be confronted here.
To give a broader idea of the issue, a network is often said to be weakly neutral if it
prohibits user discrimination, which means it does not charge users differently for the same
service. It is said to be strongly neutral if in addition it prohibits service differentiation,
that is if it does not allow to manage packets differently. In a strongly neutral network,
an architecture such as DiffServ could not be implemented. What if subscribers do choose
among different classes of priority of service: does it bring a real neutrality issue then? What
would be the best vision of a network in terms of social welfare or in terms of user welfare
is still an open question that will be discussed. The legal aspect is also important here and
needs to be discussed; indeed, since P2P BitTorrent (for instance, even if its proportion of
the total traffic is declining) and streaming video (the increasing part) generate huge data
volumes of illegal (copyrighted) material, ISPs cannot be blamed for facilitating theft if
neutrality is kept in its current form.
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2.2.2 Who brings the most added-value, and who should pay the other in a
non-neutral network?
The issue of network neutrality has come up because ISPs claimed that it acts as a disincentive
for investment and capacity expansion of their networks. The validity of this argument
has to be verified. For instance, in [4], the authors studied this argument and came to
the conclusion that, under net neutrality, ISPs invest to reach a social optimal level, while
they tend to under/over-invest when neutrality is dropped. In their setting, ISPs stand
as winners while content providers (CPs) are left in a worse position, and users who pay
the ISPs for preferential treatment are better off while other consumers have a significantly
worse service. ISPs often justify charging CPs by quantifying the large amount of network
resources “big” content providers use. On the other hand, the content a CP offers does
contribute to the demand for Internet access, and thus benefits the access providers. This
aspect is not considered in the ISPs’ claim. For instance, some customers subscribe to ISPs
because they want to have access to CPs such as YouTube, Amazon or facebook; this has to
be taken into account. Some references have already advocated the use of the Shapley value
as a fair way to share profits between the providers, see, e.g., [10, 11]. The Shapley value
is such that each provider (CP or ISP) will receive a share of the revenue proportional to
its contribution to the total revenue and bargaining power. One of the main benefits of this
approach is that it yields Pareto optimality for all players, and requires in particular that
CPs, many of whom receive third-party income such as advertising revenue from consumers’
demand, help pay for the network access that makes this new income possible.
All the models studied for now are nevertheless quite simple and need to be made closer
to reality. We expect to represent all actors in a model:
• End-users who decide which ISP to be associated with depending on access price, QoS
level (which depends itself on the number of customers) and choice of CPs they can
reach;
• (Competitive) CPs making money thanks to advertising (the more end-users that visit,
the larger the revenue) and pay an access price to a provider they are connected to
(the choice of this provider could be considered fixed or a decision possibility, typically
chosen as the one maximizing the CP revenue).
• Competitive ISPs who offer a given capacity and propose an access price to end-users
and directly connected CPs, and/or a transit price to other ISPs. Demand will spread
among providers according to those offers and the CPs that are reachable.
Those assumptions illustrate the interdependences of strategies among all players. We will
study the model in the neutral case as presented just above and compare the results with
those in the non-neutral situation where ISPs are in addition allowed to charge distant CPs,
but those CPs are entitled to refuse to be connected to that ISP. In that case, the ISPs take
the risk of losing some customers to competitors which have made that connection.
We will compare the Shapley value of ISPs and CPs to investigate whether this claim
that value is brought by ISPs is true or not (note that we do not assume cooperation here,
the Shapley value coming from cooperative game theory, but we just want to compute the
share if revenue that can be assigned to come from each party).
2.2.3 What is the impact of neutrality on network investments?
The question of disincentive for ISPs to invest in network technologies and infrastructures
on a long term, as brought by opponents of network neutrality, is also worth being studied
deeper.
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A way to tackle this problem is to consider a repeated version with infinite horizon of the
above game where ISPs also have the possibility to invest on technologies and capacities.
Here too, a comparison between the neutral and the non-neutral cases will give an answer
to the question.
If neutrality has an impact on investment, one could imagine introducing rules to enforce
ISPs to invest a part of their revenues in the infrastructure. This could typically be implemented
when selling licences in the wireless context. Remark that this regulatory rule can
be supported by the article 3.1 of the directive 2002/22/CE (in french): “Les Etats Membres
veillent à ce que les services énumérés dans le présent chapitre soient mis à la disposition de
tous les utilisateurs finals sur leur territoire, indépendamment de leur position géographique,
au niveau de qualité spécifié et, compte tenu de circonstances nationales particulières, à un
prix abordable”. This would also deserve to be analyzed.
2.2.4 What is the impact of non-neutrality on (content) innovation?
Another common idea, brought by the advocates of network neutrality this time, is that
non-neutrality will prevent innovation, entrepreneurship and investment at the content level
[5]. Indeed, it is often argued that Google, facebook or Twitter, among others, might not
have developed in the case of a non-neutral network if they would have to pay the distant
ISPs at the beginning of their business, and that many new services would be prevented
from appearing due to these additional costs, at the expense of the whole system future
value. This claim has to be verified. We want to model innovation (in terms of content) as
a function of costs and investigate if there is a threshold over which non-neutrality would
curb the development of the network and if it would eventually also induce losses for the
ISPs also. The investment stage (which can be understood as choosing the quality of the
content provider) has rarely been modeled explicitly, specially in a setting where ISPs also
select quality and investment.
2.2.5 Shall we (at least) allow service differentiation?
While all the above questions deal with the IPSs charging CPs for the traffic they send
on their network, we would like to address the interest of weak neutrality being acceptable
or not, by allowing service differentiation in case of congestion to allow a better perceived
QoS, but without differentiation based on CP or end-user identity. Including the induced
management costs in the previous models, we will compare the results on social welfare, user
welfare, innovation with respect to a fully neutral network. But the decision of implementing
service differentiation being at the appreciation of the ISP, this will depend on the resulting
potential revenue increase.
A related issue is about migrating from the pure flat-rate pricing to a scheme where the
real value of the service could be taken into account, and how to implement it smoothly.
Indeed, changing for instance to a volume-based pricing of flows may solve problems of
security, intellectual property protections of content, and (potential) under-funding growth
in network infrastructure [7]. The impact on the network neutrality and entrepreneurship
aspects can be studied.
2.3 Expected results
The objective of this project is to study the validity and interest of network neutrality
and to answer the above questions thanks to mathematical models. This will give useful
information to a policy maker before taking strategical decisions.
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Legislation on Network Neutrality will shape the future Internet, and will thus have an
enormous impact on its nature. The Internet is expected to centralize around 30% of the
French economic activity in the coming years, and hence its evolution is a central strategic
aspect in French economy.
This ARC has as main objective to ensure that French experts in the French academia
and research institutes will be aware of the issues that are being decided and would be
able to contribute to this debate. We should mention that in parallel to the French public
consultation on network neutrality, that was launched by the government on April 2010, the
French telecom regulation authority, ARCEP, organized an International workshop on this
issue with representatives of all economic actors including Academia. Not one representative
from the Academia came from France.
We are aware that the topic of Net Neutrality is a complex one since it involves both
technological aspects as well as economics and law. We therefore have as a secondary
objective to create an interdisciplinary active group that involves experts in networking,
economics and law that would study and analyze the current issues that concern the future
Internet. Moreover, in order to understand the impact on French economy, our group will
include researchers from industry. Typically, a goal is, hopefully in the first year of the
project (due to the very hot nature of network neutrality), to set up a European project
on this issue, arising from the initial discussions within the group, and within INRIA an
“Action d’Evergure” on this broader aspect of Network Economics, a topic which could be
highlighted more in the institute.
2.4 State of the art and positioning
The response from the INRIA researchers to the French consultation [1] was not the only
one; we can mention among others the response from the regulation authority ARCEP [3].
A summary of public consultations can be found in [19].
Network neutrality analysis has attracted a lot of attention recently. The reader can
for instance go to http://www.ssrn.com/ and check the number of publications associated
with keyword “Network Neutrality” (184 on October 5) or the book [8]. Tim Wu (Columbia
University) is considered as the inventor of the expression “Network Neutrality”; his web
page http://timwu.org/network_neutrality.html contains useful informations and definitions.
There exist several projects on this theme. We have identified
• Network Neutrality Squad (http://www.nnsquad.org/) is an open-membership, opensource
effort, project that aims at keeping Internet “fair”, by fostering discussion on
detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or
other restrictive actions from ISPs. This project is a networking-oriented, and explictly
favors neutrality.
• Dynamic platform Standards Project for Real Network Neutrality (http://www.dpsproject.
com/) is also a project lobbying for neutrality.
• Media Access Project http://www.mediaaccess.org/ is a non-profit law firm and
advocacy organization promoting freedom of speech. They have a special section on
network neutrality.
• GTNOISE Network Access Neutrality Project at Georgia Tech (http://www.gtnoise.
net/nano/) develops a monitoring tool to identify performance degradations due to
network neutrality violation by ISPs.
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But all those projects are user or technological projects typically defending neutrality. Our
goal is rather to study neutrality from the mathematical modeling and analysis point of view.
Among the most prominent groups working on this last specific point, we can mention:
• In the USA:
– (N. Stier and G. Weintraub (Columbia University) with P. Njoroge and A. Ozdaglar
(MIT) have started a similar work on network neutrality modeling and analysis
[16]. In the preliminary work, they have used game theory to create a model that
mimics a two-sided market for Internet access with at one side ISPs receiving
payment streams from consumers and CPs, so that platforms compete for consumer
and CP fees, and at the other side, CPs. N. Stier (a former collaborator
of several EPI INRIA, among which Dionysos) is part of our proposal to bring
their point of view.
– G. Kesidis (Penn State University) is also an active member o network neutrality
analysis via game theory. He is also part of the project, cooperating with EPI
Maestro on this [2], and will also bring the North-American aspect and point of
view.
– Another stream of works is by J. Musachio (UC Santa Cruz), G. Schwartz and J.
Walrand (UC Berkeley)[15, 14] who also study how the network regime (neutral
or non-neutral) affects provider investment incentives, network quality and user
prices.
– A. Odlyzko (University of Minnesota) [17] who rather analyzes the historic aspects,
the price discrimination precedents, and the value of bits and content versus
connectivity.
• In Europe, basically in France:
– the already mentionned and preliminary modeling work [2] within INRIA;
– the noticeable work of Claudia Savedraa, finishing her PhD jointly at Orange
Labs and École Polytechnique and who started to study the bargaining power
between CPs and ISPs [18].
• In Asia:
– The work at the Chinese University of Hong-Kong, in collaboration with Columbia
University, [10, 11] where the authors make use of cooperative game theory and
Shapley value to share the revenue among actors.
As can be seen, all the initiatives we have found about the mathematical modeling
aspect are quite individual ones. This project is to our knowledge the first that brings officially
together academics and industry (network architects and providers), mixing experts in
telecommunications technology, applied mathematics, law and economics on those modeling
aspects.
3 Financial appendix
We estimate the necessary budget for the two years of this ARC at 73 ke (86.6 ke counting
the total cost of a post-doc). This budget can be decomposed into the following way:
• Organization of a kick-off workshop followed by one day of (internal) brainstorming:
12 ke
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– costs are made of participants trips and expenses for two days, and the invitation
of two international experts.
• Trips for bilateral or multi-lateral internal meetings over the two years: 20 ke
• Organization of a final workshop: 10 ke
– costs are made of participants trips and expenses for two days.
• Recruiting a postdoc for one year, in EPI Dionysos. 31 ke(counting salary only; 44.6
ke if talking about total cost).
The workshops will be organized in Rennes, Paris or Sophia-Antipolis in order to minimize
the costs.
The postdoc will work on the game-theoretic analysis of the models designed by the
participants.
References
[1] E. Altman, C. Barakat, P. Bernhard, E. Fleury, P. Jacquet, A. Legout, C. Touati,
B. Tuffin, and S. Wong. Réponse à la consultation sur la neutralité du net. http:
//www-sop.inria.fr/members/Eitan.Altman/DOC/conult-fr-sbm.pdf, 2010.
[2] E. Altman, P. Bernhard, S. Caron, G. Kesidis, J. Rojas-Mora, and S. Wong. A study
of non-neutral networks with usage-based prices. In Proceedings of the 3rd ETM Workshop,
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