Technical Assessment and Deployment Considerations of Economic Traffic Management Mechanisms

This paper presents the technical assessment of the Economic Traffic Management (ETM) mechanisms that have been specified and implemented in the EU FP7 SmoothIT (Simple Economic Management Approaches of Overlay Traffic in Heterogeneous Internet Topologies) project. The proposal inter-relates traditional mechanisms of network management with economic incentives. The most relevant ETM mechanisms are being implemented in an architectural framework for integrating ETM into today´s ISP networks. This implementation architecture is outlined and it forms the ground for the technical assessment of the proposed methods whose main goals are to validate the effectiveness of the locality mechanisms as a way to reduce network costs and to improve the quality experienced by overlay users and the scalability validation of the proposed solution.