ITR: Economics of Network Pricing and Resource Provisioning in a Competitive Market

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Pricing has been extensively studied as a tool to relieve congestion in the Internet. In much of the prior literature, however, pricing is viewed as an incentive to the end users to self-regulate in a manner such that the network resources are shared in a fair manner. This view of pricing, which has its roots in convex programming and duality theory, equates the price of a resource with the incremental benefit to the system utility of adding one unit of the resource. However, the impact of price as a possible revenue stream for the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is usually ignored in this prevailing point of view. This three-year program, we will study pricing from a new perspective, one of maximizing the revenue of ISPs. The research proposal will also study the impact of such an active pricing scheme on the customers of the network.Intellectual Merits: Research to be carried out in the context of this project is expected to lead to major advances in the methodology and design of pricing schemes and resource provisioning in communication networks, as well as to some new fundamental results in the theories of static and dynamic games, learning algorithms, and distributed computation.Broader Impact: This project will develop a new graduate-level course on game theory, geared toward engineering students. The course will incorporate several applications of game theory in network economic models. The PIs, who have a good record of accomplishment in recruiting women and other under-represented groups as graduate students, will focus their efforts in involving these students in the proposed research activities.