This thesis presents a complete alternative service composition model named Service Trading Marketplace Network (STAMP-Net). The primary concept is to improve overall system scalability and introduce a fair business scheme for customers and providers. STAPM-Net focuses on designing an architecture based on both technical and business aspect. In STAMP-NET, users remain the ability to choose their preference service providers from potential-provider lists, and service providers are able to compete for the requested services that they can handle. For these purposes, STAMP-Net introduce a concept of 'Service Trading Marketplace Mechanism' which facilitates a problem of 'conflict of interest'; 'Indirect Service Discovery' which allows service providers to the learn existing of services being offered by other service providers; and 'Service Subcontract System' which allows service providers to subcontract any missing service to other potential service providers. In addition, this thesis also present monitor techniques, which are used to ensure the quality of services.

Google Inc. struggles arduously on the digital battlefield in China’s Internet search engine market. In China, Baidu.com has been described as China’s Google for years and challenged Google’s expansion. This study provides an overview of the Internet service development in China, an illustration of the search engines’ profitability models, and an evaluation of Guge (Google China) and Baidu’s service designs. Overall, the research shows an attempt to understand the possible advantages and disadvantages when a multinational Internet service company enters China. Two notions emerge. First, standardization and adaptation may need to be nicely balanced for the subsidiary company in order to profit in China’s Internet market. Second, Google’s operation in China, Guge, stands strong on the service design end, especially in the area of “ease of use,” “informativeness,” and “fulfillment/reliability.” However, Guge’s major rival, Baidu, shows its advantage on a wider selection of online services. Therefore, in the long run, which company will win at the finishing line is still too early to tell / Google in China -- Google, Baidu and Guge -- Search engine's revenue model in China. / Department of Telecommunications

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2003. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-197).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Apr. 16, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-63).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, March, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 200-210)

Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, like any other rational entity make decisions to maximize their profit. While some of their decisions are on how to attract customers, they inevitably need to control how much resources consumers utilize. In this dissertation, we focus on two different aspects of ISP's decisions, including bandwidth allocation and pricing techniques through which ISPs manage allotting their limited capacity to users with high demand, and zero-rating, which can be one of the tools through which the ISP can attract customers. For bandwidth allocation, this dissertation discusses the data plans available for each user's monthly billing cycle. Within those, the ISPs guarantee a fixed amount of data at high rates until a byte threshold is reached, at which point the user's data rate is throttled to a lower rate for the remainder of the cycle. In practice, the thresholds and rates of throttling can appear and may be somewhat arbitrary. In this dissertation, we evaluate the choice of threshold and rate as an optimization problem (regret minimization) and demonstrate that intuitive formulations of client regret, which preserve desirable fairness properties, lead to optimization problems that have tractably computable solutions. For zero-rating options in the ISP market, and their relation to net neutrality, we begin by introducing the concept of zero-rating, which refers to the practice of providing free Internet access to some users under certain conditions, and usually concurs with differentiation among users or content providers. Even though zero-rating is banned in some countries (India, Canada), others have either taken no stance or explicitly allowed it (South Africa, Kenya, U.S.). While there is broad agreement that preserving the content quality of service falls under the purview of net neutrality, the role of differential pricing, especially the practice of \emph{zero-rating} remains controversial. An objective of net neutrality is to design regulations for the Internet and ensure that it remains a public, open platform where innovations can thrive. We show the practice of zero-rating does not agree with that. This dissertation shows how ISPs could make zero-rating decisions to attract customers, and then show how these decisions may negatively impact the market and customer welfare, which necessitates the existence of some zero-rating regulations.

THE INTERNET AND THE PROTECTION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY-THE SCOPE OF LIABILITY OF INDIVIDUAL PERSONS WITHIN THE LAW OF THE EUROPEAN COMUNITIES AND THE USA Internet service providers' (or online service providers') liability for the copyright infringement incurred by an individual user of the Internet is not an absolutely new issue anymore. Not later than in 1998, the U.S. legislators enact the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This amendment to the US copyright law introduces the concept of ,,safe harbor" that limits the online service providers' liability when they act only as a passive conduit and at the same time they do not have actual knowledge of the copyright infringement incurred through their systems. In the absence of such actual knowledge, they may not be aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent. Furthermore, an Online service provider is obliged upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness (e.g. by obtaining a notice), to act expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material. This requirement is well known as a ,,take down notice procedure". As a response to the U.S. regulation, in 2000, the European Commission and the European parliament pass the ,,so called" E-commerce directive regulating the liability of above mentioned subjects in...

Principal acteur de la communication au public en ligne, le fournisseur d'accès à Internet offre une connexion, contrôle les points d'accès, identifie les utilisateurs. Ses responsabilités extra-contractuelles résultent de ses multiples fonctions : prestataire technique, responsable de traitement des données, exécutant d'injonctions judiciaires. Ses responsabilités sont abondantes et parfois surabondantes. Toutefois, malgré un régime de responsabilité qui lui est spécifiquement applicable, la notion de "fournisseur d'accès à Internet" n'est toujours pas juridiquement définie. Cette imprécision de la notion entraîne une profusion de régimes juridiques imposant le statut de fournisseur d'accès à des acteurs dont l'activité principale n'est pas la fourniture d'une connexion à Internet : Universités, entreprises, particuliers. Dès lors, les responsabilités extra-contractuelles pénales, civiles et administratives se multiplient et créent un régime obligationnel instable, obscur, voire abscons. Cet éclatement lexical et juridique est encore aggravé par l'application fonctionnelle à l'activité de fourniture d'accès, du droit des communications électroniques et de la société de l'information. Il est alors nécessaire de proposer une définition formelle du fournisseur d'accès à Internet susceptible d'unifier son régime de responsabilité autour de notions juridiques stabilisées. Cette reconstruction affectera inévitablement la réglementation relative à la communication au public en ligne et à ses acteurs, mais proposera une possible fondation au droit des communications électroniques / Internet Service Providers are major actors of the Information Society. They offer connections, controls access points, and can also identify their users. Their many liabilities result from their multiple functions as technical services provider, data controller or performers of judicial orders. These legal obligations are numerous and sometimes overabundant. In spite of an existing and specific liability status, the very notion of "Internet service provider" still remains legally undefined. This lacuna entails a profusion of legal status imposing an ISP status to players for which the main activity is not to provide an Internet connection : Universities, companies, individuals. From then on, criminal, civil and administrative liabilities multiply and create an instable, obscure and even abstruse status. This lexical and legal scattering is even worsened by the functional application of the electronic communications and Information Society legal framework to access providing activities. It is then necessary to unify the legal regimes associated to those activities according to stabilized legal concepts. This reconstruction will inevitably affect the Information Society legal framework as a whole. Eventually, it will open on a possible ground for the electronic communications legal framework

Today's popular over-the-top (OTT) video streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix and Hulu deliver video contents to viewers using adaptive bitrate (ABR) technologies. In ABR streaming, a video player running on a viewer's device adaptively changes bitrates to match given network conditions. However, providing reliable streaming is challenging. First, an ABR player may select an inappropriate bitrate during playback due to the lack of direct knowledge of access networks, frequent user mobility and rapidly changing channel conditions. Second, OTT content is delivered to viewers without any cooperation with Internet service providers (ISPs). Last, there are no appropriate tools that evaluate the performance of ABR streaming along with video quality of experience (QoE). This thesis describes how to improve the video QoE of OTT video streaming services using ABR technologies. Our analysis starts from understanding ABR heuristics. How does ABR streaming work? What factors does an ABR player consider when switching bitrates during a download? Then, we propose our solutions to improve existing ABR streaming from the perspective of network operators who deliver video content through their networks and video service providers who build ABR players running on viewers' devices. From the network operators' point of view, we propose to find a better video content server based on round trip times (RTTs) between an edge node of a wireless network and available video content servers when a viewer requests a video. The edge node can be an Internet Service Provider (ISP) router in a Wi-Fi network and a packet data network gateway (P-GW) in a 4G network. During the experiments, our solution showed better TCP performance (e.g., higher TCP throughput during playback) 146 times out of 200 experiments (73%) over Wi-Fi networks and 162 times out of 200 experiments (81%) over 3G networks. In addition, we claim that the wireless edge nodes can assist an ABR video player in selecting the best available bitrate by controlling the available bandwidth in the radio access network between a base station and a viewer's device. In our Wi-Fi testbed, the proposed solution saved up to 21% of radio bandwidth on mobile devices and enhanced the viewing experience by reducing rebufferings during playback. Last, we assert that software-defined networking (SDN) can improve video QoE by dynamically controlling routing paths of video streaming flows based on the provisioned networking information collected from SDN-enabled networking devices. Using an off-the-shelf SDN platform, we showed that our proposed solution can reduce rebufferings by 50% and provide higher bitrates during a download. From the perspective of video service providers, higher video QoE can be achieved by improving ABR heuristics implemented in an ABR player. To support this idea, we investigated the role of playout buffer size in ABR streaming and its impact on video QoE. Through our video QoE survey, we proved that a large buffer does not always outperform a small buffer, especially under rapidly varying network conditions. Based on this finding, we suggest to dynamically change the maximum buffer size in an ABR player depending on the current capacity of its playout buffer for improving the QoE of viewers. During the experiments, our proposed solution improved the viewing experience by offering 15% higher average played bitrate, 70% fewer bitrate changes and 50% shorter rebuffering duration. Our experimental results show that even small changes of ABR heuristics and new features of network systems can greatly affect video QoE. However, it is still difficult for video service providers or network operators to evaluate new ABR heuristics or network system changes due to lack of accurate QoE monitoring systems. In order to solve this issue, we have developed YouSlow ("YouTube Too Slow!? - YouSlow") as a new approach to monitoring video QoE for the analysis of ABR performance. The lightweight web browser plug-in and mobile application are designed to monitor various playback events (e.g., rebuffering duration and frequency of bitrate changes) directly from within ABR video players and calculate statistics along with video QoE. Using YouSlow, we investigate the impact of the above playback events on video abandonment: about 10% of viewers abandoned the YouTube videos when the pre-roll ads lasted for 15 seconds. Even increasing the bitrate can annoy viewers; they prefer a high starting bitrate with no bitrate changes during playback. Our regression analysis shows that bitrate changes do not affect video abandonment significantly and the abandonment rate can be estimated accurately using the rebuffering ratio and the number of rebufferings. The thesis includes four main contributions. First, we investigate today's popular OTT video streaming services (e.g., YouTube and Netflix) that use ABR streaming technologies. Second, we propose to build QoS and QoE aware video streaming that can be implemented in existing wireless networks (e.g., Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G) and in SDN-enabled networks. Third, we propose to improve current ABR heuristics by dynamically changing the playout buffer size under varying network conditions. Last, we designed and implemented a new monitoring system for measuring video QoE.