Wang, Qian. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-74). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iii / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- A Review of Pricing in Internet Industry --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Static Pricing --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Flat-rate Pricing --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Usage-based Pricing --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- Paris Metro Pricing --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- Dynamic Pricing --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Smart-market Pricing --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Responsive Pricing --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Edge Pricing --- p.12 / Chapter 2.3 --- Comparisons --- p.14 / Chapter 2.4 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.17 / Chapter 3 --- Uplink Pricing --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.18 / Chapter 3.2 --- Model Description --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3 --- Uplink Pricing in a Competitive Market --- p.36 / Chapter 3.4 --- The Cooperative Strategy with Uplink Pricing --- p.40 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- The Cooperative Case --- p.41 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- The Threat Strategy --- p.45 / Chapter 3.5 --- Further Discussion --- p.47 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Accounting Cost --- p.47 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- Peer-to-Peer Locality --- p.48 / Chapter 3.6 --- Related Works --- p.48 / Chapter 3.7 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.49 / Chapter 4 --- Viability of Paris Metro Pricing --- p.51 / Chapter 4.1 --- The Model --- p.52 / Chapter 4.2 --- Flat-rate Pricing versus Paris Metro Pricing --- p.54 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- One-channel Flat-rate Pricing --- p.55 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Two-Channel Identical Pricing --- p.56 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Flat-rate Pricing versus Two-Channel Iden-tical Pricing --- p.57 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- Flat-rate Pricing versus Paris Metro Pricing --- p.59 / Chapter 4.3 --- Case Studies --- p.60 / Chapter 4.4 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.62 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.63 / A Equation Derivation --- p.65 / Chapter A. --- l Proof for Lemma 3.3.2 --- p.65 / Bibliography --- p.71

We developed a price-based resource allocation scheme for Differentiated Service (DiffServ) data networks. The DiffServ framework was proposed to provide multiple QoS classes over IP networks. Since the provider supports multiple service classes, we need a differentiated pricing scheme, as supposed to the flat-rate scheme employed by the Internet service providers of today. Charging efficiently is a big issue. The utility of a client correlates to the amount of bandwidth allocated. One difficulty we face is that determining the appropriate amount of bandwidth to provision and allocate is problematic due to different time scales, multiple QoS classes and the unpredictable nature of users. To approach this problem, we designed a pricing strategy for Admission Control and bandwidth assignment. Despite the variety of existing pricing strategies, the common theme is that the appropriate pricing policy rewards users for behaving in ways to improve the overall utilization and performance of the network. Among existing schemes, we chose auction because it is scalable, and efficiently and fairly shares resources. Our pricing model takes the system's availability and each customer's requirements as inputs and outputs the set of clients who are admitted into the network and their allocated resource. Each client proposes a desired bandwidth and a price that they are willing to pay for it. The service provider collects this information and produces parameters for each class of service they provide. This information is used to decide which customers to admit. We proposed an optimal solution to the problem of maximizing the provider's revenue for the special case where there is only one bottleneck link in the network. Then for the generalized network, we resort to a simple but effective heuristic method. We validate both the optimal solution and the heuristic algorithm with simulations driven by a real traffic scenario. Finally, we allow customers to bid on the duration for which the service is needed. Then we study the performance of those heuristic algorithms in this new setting and propose possible improvements.

Thesis (M.ICT.)--University of Wollongong, 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 112-121.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-91). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

A study is done on the protection of sound recordings in the decentralized peer-to-peer (DP2P) file sharing in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. This study reveals that because sound recordings have unique features different from other copyright works, the illegal sharing of sound recordings can ordinarily be filtered, identified, and detected by the Internet service providers (ISPs) before granting access to users and without infringing the users‟ right to privacy. However, the ISPs have failed in this regard, hence, they are strictly held liable under the contributory, vicarious and inducing infringements notwithstanding the statutory law which prohibits ISPs from monitoring, and intercepting their networks. In fact and law, the terms filtering, identifying and detecting on the one hand and monitoring and intercepting on the other hand are different in relation to sound recordings and as such ISPs are not prohibited from filtering, identifying and detecting illegal sound recordings on their networks, thus, ISPs are not protected under the limitation law as it is generally believed. However, several recommendations are made for reform, inter alia: a review of the limitation law to include the terms filtering, identifying and detecting in pursuance of the terms monitoring, and intercepting, if the intention of the legislators was meant to include the latter terms; protection of access right in digital sound recordings, protection of the neighbouring rights of ISPs in the digital world, imposing levies on all recording equipment, the insurability of sound recordings and ISPs‟ signals, and bandwidth. / Mercentile Law / LL. M. (Mercantile Law)

A study is done on the protection of sound recordings in the decentralized peer-to-peer (DP2P) file sharing in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. This study reveals that because sound recordings have unique features different from other copyright works, the illegal sharing of sound recordings can ordinarily be filtered, identified, and detected by the Internet service providers (ISPs) before granting access to users and without infringing the users‟ right to privacy. However, the ISPs have failed in this regard, hence, they are strictly held liable under the contributory, vicarious and inducing infringements notwithstanding the statutory law which prohibits ISPs from monitoring, and intercepting their networks. In fact and law, the terms filtering, identifying and detecting on the one hand and monitoring and intercepting on the other hand are different in relation to sound recordings and as such ISPs are not prohibited from filtering, identifying and detecting illegal sound recordings on their networks, thus, ISPs are not protected under the limitation law as it is generally believed. However, several recommendations are made for reform, inter alia: a review of the limitation law to include the terms filtering, identifying and detecting in pursuance of the terms monitoring, and intercepting, if the intention of the legislators was meant to include the latter terms; protection of access right in digital sound recordings, protection of the neighbouring rights of ISPs in the digital world, imposing levies on all recording equipment, the insurability of sound recordings and ISPs‟ signals, and bandwidth. / Mercentile Law / LL. M. (Mercantile Law)

This research proposes a new dynamic energy management framework for a backbone Internet Protocol over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (IP over DWDM) network. Maintaining the logical IP-layer topology is a key constraint of our architecture whilst saving energy by infrastructure sleeping and virtual router migration. The traffic demand in a Tier 2/3 network typically has a regular diurnal pattern based on people‟s activities, which is high in working hours and much lighter during hours associated with sleep. When the traffic demand is light, virtual router instances can be consolidated to a smaller set of physical platforms and the unneeded physical platforms can be put to sleep to save energy. As the traffic demand increases the sleeping physical platforms can be re-awoken in order to host virtual router instances and so maintain quality of service. Since the IP-layer topology remains unchanged throughout virtual router migration in our framework, there is no network disruption or discontinuities when the physical platforms enter or leave hibernation. However, this migration places extra demands on the optical layer as additional connections are needed to preserve the logical IP-layer topology whilst forwarding traffic to the new virtual router location. Consequently, dynamic optical connection management is needed for the new framework. Two important issues are considered in the framework, i.e. when to trigger the virtual router migration and where to move virtual router instances to? For the first issue, a reactive mechanism is used to trigger the virtual router migration by monitoring the network state. Then, a new evolutionary-based algorithm called VRM_MOEA is proposed for solving the destination physical platform selection problem, which chooses the appropriate location of virtual router instances as traffic demand varies. A novel hybrid simulation platform is developed to measure the performance of new framework, which is able to capture the functionality of the optical layer, the IP layer data-path and the IP/optical control plane. Simulation results show that the performance of network energy saving depends on many factors, such as network topology, quiet and busy thresholds, and traffic load; however, savings of around 30% are possible with typical medium-sized network topologies.

Peer-to-peer (p2p) technology provides an excellent platform for the delivery of rich content and media that scales with the rapid growth of the Internet. This work presents a lookup service design and implementation that provides provable fault tolerance and operates in a cost-conscious manner over the Internet. <br><br> Using a distributed hash table (DHT) as a foundation, we propose a replica placement that improves object availability and reachability to implement a robust lookup service. We present a framework that describes tree-based routing DHTs and formally prove several properties for DHTs of this type. Specifically, we prove that our replica placement, which we call MaxDisjoint, creates a provable number of disjoint routes from any source node to a replica set. We evaluate this technique through simulation and demonstrate that it creates disjoint routes more effectively than existing replica placements. Furthermore, we show that disjoint routes have a marked impact on routing robustness, which we measure as the probability of lookup success. <br><br> To mitigate the costs incurred by multi-hop DHT routing, we develop an organization-based id assignment scheme that bounds the transit costs of prefix-matching routes. To further reduce costs, we use MaxDisjoint placement to create multiple routes of varying costs. This technique helps reduce cost in two ways: (1) replication may create local copies of an object that can be accessed at zero transit cost and (2) MaxDisjoint replication creates multiple, bounded cost, disjoint routes of which the minimal cost route can be used to resolve the lookup. We model the trade-off between the storage cost and routing cost benefit of replication to find the optimal degree to which an object should be replicated. We evaluate our approach using a lookup service implementation and show that it dramatically reduces cost over existing DHT implementations. Furthermore, we show that our technique can be used to manage objects of varying popularity in a manner that is more cost effective than caching. <br><br> By improving its robustness and cost effectiveness, we aim to increase the pervasiveness of p2p in practice and unlock the potential of this powerful technology.

Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are crucial to the operation and development of the Internet. However, through the performance of their basic functions, they faced the great risk of civil and criminal liability for unlawful content posted by third parties. As this risk threatened the potential of the Internet, various jurisdictions opted to promulgate legislation that granted ISP’s safe harbours from liability. The South African (RSA) response is Chapter XI of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act (ECTA). The protection it provides is however not absolute. It is limited to ISP’s that are members of an Industry Representative Body (IRB) and those ISP’s must perform particular functions in relation to third party content in a certain manner to obtain limited liability. Due to the ECTA’s limited application and a lack of authority, the question is raised as to what is the liability of ISP’s for unlawful content posted by third parties? This dissertation pays particular attention to ISP liability for third party defamatory statements, hate speech, and obscene and indecent material. The role and characteristics of ISP’s in the functioning of the Internet is described. It is determined that a wide legal definition would be required to encompass the many roles they perform. The definition provided by the ECTA is wide and many different types of ISP can fall underneath it. This may have unintended consequences as entities may receive protection that the legislature did not intend. The appropriate laws in the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom are surveyed and suggestions as to the extent of ISP liability in circumstances where the ECTA does not apply are made. It is established that their position is uncertain due to difficulties in applying the law to the Internet. This could result in the law being applied incorrectly and ISP’s erroneously found liable. The ECTA’s threshold requirements limit the availability of the safe harbor provisions to ISP’s that are members of a recognised IRB. The IRB must comply with an extensive set of requirements to obtain recognition. The purpose of these requirements is to ensure that only responsible ISP’s obtain the protection provided by the act. After an examination of these requirements, their necessity is questioned as their purpose appears to be contrary to the logic of the safe harbours provided by the ECTA. The safe harbours are analysed and comparisons made to similar legislation that exists in the USA and the European Union (EU). It was established that the ECTA is a hybrid of the USA and EU legislation, and to a certain extent improves on them. It was suggested that the extent of ISP liability in relation to certain unlawful content is clearer under the ECTA. However, exceptions may exist in relation to hate speech and obscene and indecent content as a result of legislation that does not properly take the technology of the Internet into account. It was recommended that certain action be taken to correct this position to prevent any negative effects on the Internet industry and conflict with the objectives of the ECTA. The provision of limited liability contained in the ECTA is balanced with a notice and takedown procedure, which provides relief to victims of unlawful content. This procedure is analysed and it appears to be effective in providing relief. However, through an examination of concerns raised in relation to this type of procedure as it exists in the USA and the EU, it is suggested that certain flaws exist. The take-down procedure negatively effects the freedom of expression and the third party’s rights to due process. Further, the threshold requirements result in not all the users of the Internet being provided with the same remedies. It is recommended that certain action be taken to correct these flaws. The solution provided by the ECTA should be favoured over the uncertainty that existed before it promulgation. It may be necessary to correct particular flaws that exist. Certain recommendations are suggested in this regard and the concluding chapter.

This thesis deals with specialized information systems for internet service providers. The aim of thesis is to compare specific information system of company Dupeto s.r.o. with an-other external systems. The first part of the thesis deals with the theoretical foundations, which is followed by the analysis of a market of this systems. After making choice of which systems are the propriet ones, the thesis gives a detailed description of these sys-tems. In conclusion there is a recommendation for Dupeto s.r.o. which system is the best for this company. This recommendation was achieved by the means of a multi-criteria de-cision making. This thesis is so helpful mainly for this company but it is helpful for other internet service providers too because it contains the analysis of the systems from various point of views.