The volume and importance of content is increasing in the Internet, whereas the ability of the Internet architecture to scale to the growing demand for transport capacity is uncertain. Even though the natural growth in the demand continues, the growth in traffic volumes can be limited by reducing unnecessary content copying and redundant transportation of the same content. Information-centric networking (ICN), featuring globally unique naming of content and optimized in-network caching, has been suggested as a potential future solution to significantly reduce unnecessary traffic, but its economic feasibility has not been widely studied. This paper evaluates the economic feasibility of ICN by using the two-sided markets theory to analyze four Internet content delivery models: the client-server model, content delivery network (CDN) model, peerto-peer model and ICN model. Value networks and two-sided markets of these content delivery models are identified in the process. The results suggest that content providers can be willing to pay for the lower delay of content delivery in ICN, if ICN can solve its coordination problems related to cost-allocation, contracting, quality of service guarantees, and content usage statistics. These incentive challenges are essentially the same as in-network web caching originally faced and could not overcome. Internet 2 access providers may also consider investing in the deployment of ICN due to reduced interconnection costs. However, the ICN model may require a revenue-creating business model to make it more attractive to Internet access providers than the CDN model that provides similar cost savings.
Abstract-Successful deployment of new network protocols on the Future Internet is not a trivial task. Deployable protocol design is necessary but not sufficient condition for protocol's success, unless it takes all stakeholders involved in the deployment process into account. This paper investigates the challenges of deploying a new transport protocol on the Internet, using Multipath TCP -a TCP variant that transmits along several network paths at the same time -as an example and proposes a framework for its adoption process based on diffusion theory. The paper distinguishes the roles of adopters and other stakeholders in the deployment process, and presents scenarios that enhance Multipath TCP deployment and adoption. One key finding is that the role of end users is not of significant importance for Multipath TCP deployment, because they are not necessarily in a position to make a conscious adoption decision.
The Internet has grown out of its original scope and scale while its importance for the society has increased. This has raised considerable uncertainties and concerns about the future evolution. We apply Schoemaker's scenario planning method to identify and analyze the key trends and uncertainties and to create four alternative evolution scenarios for the Internet. The scenarios reveal that the challenges the Internet is facing can be solved in various ways, yet leading to different network and business architectures. The results are valuable in directing research efforts to the most relevant issues.
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