Internet interconnection assured quality services: Issues and strategic impact

The Internet is kept together by means of a set of complex business interconnection agreements among multiple networks. However, existing peering and transit interconnection agreements do not provide any type of QoS assurance and pertain to interdomain traffic aggregates of multiple services (both elastic and inelastic). Thus, the current technological and business landscape is not appropriate for the provision of the emerging QoS-sensitive services. These and other economic inefficiencies of the current interconnection regime motivate the increasing research and business interest in providing solutions for enabling sustainable ecosystems, where these emerging services can be efficiently provisioned. In this paper we study the impact of the ETICS Assured Service Quality (ASQ) services on the strategies of the Internet interconnection market stakeholders. We investigate whether ASQ products can mitigate some undesirable strategic phenomena arising from players' conflicting interests. The relation of ASQ traffic with existing interconnection agreements and its potential to isolate traffic and/or regions of a network enables carriers to better control the business management of their infrastructure, and results in better investment incentives and services for the end-users. In fact, this applies to both best-effort and ASQ traffic. Thus, the ETICS ASQ products constitute a powerful tool for both meeting the needs of the ASQ services' customers and improving the quality of the best-effort Internet services as well, leading to a win-win outcome for all the market stakeholders.