The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Net neutrality is getting major attention these days, as it is at the crossroads between technology, economics and regulation. Discussions and new net neutrality rules and remedies are commonplace, all as a part of the attempt to find a balance between the need to follow common-carriage principles and the desire to provide different QoS by selectively blocking, slowing or providing faster connection tracks to web traffic of different customers with different applications by the ISPs.

The option of a selective blockage of certain users can be judged also under social welfare considerations. The information about which restrictions reduce the total system delay (or cost) from one hand, and which bounds lead to deterioration of the overall performance from the other, can be a significant factor in the considerations of the network administrator (e.g., limit trucks from using a certain road can benefit the highway system users and can be an acceptable action of the authorities). The restriction can be derived in order to express QoS and can be imposed on different groups of players each time.

In this talk, our goal is to analyze the effect of constraints over the network users in order to explore the potential improvement in system’s/users’ routing delay (cost) and to understand our limits in trying to benefit the overall system welfare. First, we will introduce the conceptual framework under which we formulate our research (Nonatomic / Atomic splittable routing games on a parallel links system). Then, we will show the users (and the system) behavior under predefined restrictions, that limit a group of users only to a sub graph of allowed links (for several performance functions and different types of restrictions). We will reach conclusions whether such restriction can or cannot improve the overall system cost. This analysis will provide us a convenient measurable tool to improve the system cost by limiting some system players only to specific sets of links.