Bandwidth commodity markets are an obvious opportunity to build the mechanisms and liquidity necessary to turn any amount of unused bandwidth into a cash flow today. Our approach is rather proactive, as it assumes that some of the current hurdles, such as trading infrastructure integration and contract standardization are solved. Then we ask the question: What will this market look like, how will prices behave, in a global scale? We provide an overview of several related research results. Among these, we explain the basic notion of geographical arbitrage, how QoS considerations affect the choice of provisioning paths and most importantly how spot price dynamics depend on network topology. Data on bandwidth trades is scarce today, but we use empirical observations, some trading data and global network connectivity information to support our analytical and simulation results.
By: Giorgos Cheliotis and Chris Kenyon
Published in: RZ3358 in 2001
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