Design of a protocol to enable economic transactions for network services

Deployment of innovative new networking services requires support by network providers. Since economic motivation plays an important role for network providers, it is critical that a network architecture intrinsically considers economic relationships. We present the design of a protocol that associates access to network services with economic contracts. We show how this protocol can be realized in fundamentally different ways, using out-of-band signaling and in-band signaling, based on two different prototype implementations. We present results that show the effectiveness of the proposed protocol and thus demonstrate a first step toward realizing an economy plane for the Internet.