ChoiceNet: toward an economy plane for the Internet

The Internet has been a key enabling technology for many new distributed applications and services. However, the deployment of new protocols and services in the Internet infrastructure itself has been sluggish, especially where economic incentives for network providers are unclear. In our work, we seek to develop an “economy plane” for the Internet that enables network providers to offer new networkbased services (QoS, storage, etc.) for sale to customers. The explicit connection between economic relationships and network services across various time scales enables users to select among service alternatives. The resulting competition among network service providers will lead to overall better technological solutions and more competitive prices. In this paper, we present the architectural aspects of our ChoiceNet economy plane as well as some of the technological problems that need to be addressed in a practical deployment.