A market-based end-to-end IP service model with quality-of-service (QoS) is proposed based on a recently introduced commodity contract for bandwidth. A percentage of the total trading volume in the bandwidth market is traded in terms of standard commodity contracts and across multiple public marketplaces. The various roles in this model and their relationships are explained and the notion of a bandwidth contract graph is introduced. The problem of selecting an optimal set of bandwidth contracts for end-to-end connectivity that satisfies a budget constraint and a set of quality requirements
is shown to be a link-constrained multi-path-constrained path optimization problem. This includes the multi-path-constrained problem (MPC), whose general formulation is known to be NP-complete, but we show that polynomial-time algorithms are applicable for standardized contracts. Standard contracts thus reduce the computational complexity, facilitating the expansion of bandwidth markets and the development of new, efficient brokerage services for end-to-end connectivity with quality guarantees.
By: G. Cheliotis
Published in: RZ3294 in 2000
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