18052775
Pricing of risk for loss guaranteed intra-domain internet service contracts
The Internet today offers primarily a best-effort service. Research and technology development efforts are currently underway to allow provisioning of better than best-effort Quality of Service (QoS) assurances. The residual uncertainty in QoS can be managed using pricing strategies. In this article, we develop a spot pricing framework for intra-domain expected bandwidth contracts with loss-based QoS guarantees. The framework builds on a nonlinear pricing scheme for cost recovery from earlier work and extends it to price risk. A utility-based options pricing approach is developed to account for the uncertainties in delivering loss guarantees. Application of options pricing techniques in Internet services provides a mechanism for fair risk sharing between the provider and the customer, and may be extended to price other uncertainties in QoS guarantees.
34084077
A Spot Pricing Framework For Pricing Intra-Domain Assured Bandwidth Services
The Internet today offers primarily a best-effort service. Research and technology development efforts are currently underway to allow the provisioning of better than best-effort quality of service assurances. In this article, we develop a spot pricing framework for expected bandwidth guaranteed Internet service contracts on a single domain. A nonlinear pricing model that maximizes the total surplus with cost constraints forms the basis for the framework. The spot price process is obtained for different demand profiles of the customer-base and demand arrival characteristics. Simulation modeling and analysis is employed to implement the pricing framework and analyze the price process under different market conditions and changes due to network failures. The framework when implemented at access or exchange points of different service provider domains will provide assured bandwidth for inter-domain traffic.
25366029
Formal hardware verification methods: A survey
Growing advances in VLSI technology have led to an increased level of complexity in current hardware systems. Late detection of design errors typically results in higher costs due to the associated time delay as well as loss of production. Thus it is important that hardware designs be free of errors. Formal verification has become an increasingly important technique towards establishing the correctness of hardware designs. In this article we survey the research that has been done in this area, with an emphasis on more recent trends. We present a classification framework for the various methods, based on the forms of the specification, the implementation, and the proff method. This framework enables us to better highlight the relationships and interactions between seemingly different approaches.
18286724
Watermarking of MPEG-4 Videos
A MPEG-4 compressed domain video watermarking method is proposed and its performance is studied at video bit rates ranging from 64 Kb/s to 900 Kb/s. The watermark is inserted by modifying Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) coefficients. The strength of watermark is changed according to local frame characteristics to reduce impact on visual quality. The algorithm’s performance is also studied for watermarking bits in a frame ranging from 1 Kb/frame to 3 Kb/frame. The watermark is attack-free against attacks like scaling, rotation and cropping even if blind-techniques are used.
1312822
One Hop Lookups for Peer-to-Peer Overlays
Current peer-to-peer lookup algorithms have been designed with the assumption that routing information at each member node must be kept small, so that the bookkeeping required to respond to system membership changes is also small. In this paper, we show that this assumption is unnecessary, and present a technique that maintains complete routing tables at each node. The technique is able to handle frequent membership changes and scales to large systems having more than a million nodes. The resulting peer-to-peer system is robust and can route lookup queries in just one hop, thus enabling applications that cannot tolerate the delay of multi-hop routing.
11289392
Efficient Routing for Peer-to-Peer Overlays
Most current peer-to-peer lookup schemes keep a small amount of routing state per node, typically logarithmic in the number of overlay nodes. This design assumes that routing information at each member node must be kept small, so that the bookkeeping required to respond to system membership changes is also small, given that aggressive membership dynamics are expected. As a consequence, lookups have high latency as each lookup requires contacting several nodes in sequence. 
 
In this paper, we question these assumptions by presenting two peer-to-peer routing algorithms with small lookup paths. First, we present a one-hop routing scheme. We show how to disseminate information about membership changes quickly enough so that nodes maintain accurate routing tables with complete membership information. We also deduce analytic bandwidth requirements for our scheme that demonstrate its feasibility. 
 
We also propose a two-hop routing scheme for large scale systems of more than a few million nodes, where the bandwidth requirements of one-hop routing can become too large. This scheme keeps a fixed fraction of the total routing state on each node, chosen such that the first hop has low latency, and thus the additional delay is small. 
 
We validate our analytic model using simulation results that show that our algorithms can maintain routing information sufficiently up-to-date such that a large fraction (e.g., 99%) of the queries will succeed without being re-routed.
14465668
The economics of network management
Why are pricing issues the key to infrastructure investment and future growth of the Internet? The Economics of network management I t is not surprising that researchers in network technology are utilizing ideas from the field of economics since it provides the conceptual understanding of underlying constructs such as usage and resource allocation. Proper resource allocation plays a key role in improving network performance. There are two primary approaches to economic resource allocation: quantity limits, and pricing. The former has the advantage of low accounting costs. However, it requires central administration and, for network users wishing to purchase more quantity than allocated, a pricing schedule has to be developed. The pricing approach does not enforce any quantity limits. Instead, users self-select the quantity they are willing to purchase at prevailing prices. The pricing approach decentralizes the resource allocation problem but has higher accounting costs since usage needs to be monitored and billed. The role of pricing as a resource allocation mechanism will be examined here, since central administration of quotas would be difficult in a global network. Furthermore, a pricing mechanism may still be needed to meet user demands in e-commerce. While the short-term role of economic pricing is to manage the network resources more efficiently, in the long run it could play an important role in the design of new network protocols. For example, new technological developments with priority classes in the IPv6 Internet protocol [3] will present the challenge of defining an economic basis for priority allocation. The Internet traffic-pricing problem for e-commerce subsumes traditional telecommuni-cation pricing policies and is much more complex. Traditional telecommunication systems offer a single quality level for their services on a given type of network, for example, the ability to carry voice data at a desired rate on a telephone network. However, in e-commerce there is a rich collection of services that require different levels of service quality over the same data communication network. For example, during a telnet session a user requires a high-speed and low-volume data transfer for real-time interaction with a server. On the other hand, a video conference needs clarity and coordination in picture and sound, necessitating a much more complex set of service quality attributes, such as synchronization of information sent via different interoperable applications (video, audio, and text). In addition, audio and video applications require high-volume and high-speed transfers with low variability in data transfer rates. These …