Design and Implementation of an Economically-driven Network Management Mechanisms for Overlay Networks

This work will investigate, design, and implement Economic Traffic Management (ETM) mechanisms for overlay networks and systems. The thesis has to define, describe, and implement appropriate mechanisms in a to be selected platform, which need to be viable and valid w.r.t. technical as well as economic concerns and efficiency/scalability dimensions.
An example scenario is a peer-to-peer multicast application for video distribution. Although the application has the ability of better using network resources by establishing connections directly to other peers, an optimal way of building the overlay, taking the underlay topology into consideration, is still an open question.

• Investigation, full design, prototypical implementation, exhaustive evaluation, and test of an economically-driven network management mechanism for overlay networks, which optimizes a "path-finding scheme" (for accessing resources) based on application meta information
• To make the ETM approach, transparently usable for multiple competing and cooperating ISPs and telcos, secure, and scalable up to a multi-domain scenario and to be potentially profitable
• To integrate the major software component developed into an internal test-bed infrastructure
• Performing an evaluation of the proposed scheme in a general fashion or due to constraints of the large-scale Internet structure in terms of representative scenarios