MMAPPS - Market Management of Peer-to-Peer Services

The MMAPPS project is researching how to use techniques from economics and social science to tackle some of the fundamental difficulties in creating well-founded, and therefore sustainable, P2P applications. The project's central approach is to extend techniques such as market management so that cooperation between peers can be encouraged without damaging the community-oriented structure of P2P architectures.

The project is drawing upon current economic theory and social studies (partly conducted from within our project) to develop a generic toolkit that provides a collection of such incentive schemes, suitable for supporting a wide range of P2P applications. The toolkit will support application developers in devising a scheme tailored to their own application and community. This scheme can use payment where appropriate but alongside other, community-based, accounting, reward and punishment systems. The project is also developing the descriptive and analytical tools that can be used to study the viability and appropriateness of such schemes.


IST B-BONE: Broadcasting and Multicasting over Enhanced UMTS Mobile Broadband Networks

The B-BONE project focuses on the enhancement of UMTS technology, for broadcast and multicast purposes, having as starting point the 3GPP Release 6 MBMS.

B-BONE started by performing the identification and characterisation of broadcast and multicast services, reference scenarios and requirements at user, network, services, spectrum and terminal level. Link level simulations are being performed to identify the best adaptive wireless techniques for capacity and transmission rates enhancement (MIMO systems, power and spectrally efficient coded modulation and their combination with macro-diversity combining). In parallel, resource management techniques and resource optimisation algorithms are being developed for multicast and broadcast services over a broadband all-IP UMTS network, taking into account the impact of handover and user mobility. Moreover, auction based resource allocation schemes for cost splitting were defined and evaluated. The definition of suitable metrics and evaluation scenarios, namely cellular layouts, traffic, propagation and mobility models and its implementation into the system level simulator will be followed by extensive simulations to evaluate the capacity enhancements in conjunction with the resources management gain.


M3I - Market Managed Multiservice Internet

The goal of this project is to design, implement and trial a next generation system which will enable Internet resource management through market forces, specifically by enabling differential charging for multiple levels of service.  Offering this capability will increase the value of Internet services to the customers through greater choice over price and quality and reduced congestion.  For the network provider, flexibility will be improved, management complexity reduced and hence revenues will increase. 

This project takes a radically different approach to differentiated services.  Its premise is that a simple packet network may be able to support an arbitrarily differentiated set of services by conveying information on congestion from the network to intelligent end-nodes, which themselves determine what should be their demands on the packet network.  There would then be no need for large buffers or priority queues within the network, or connection acceptance control at the border of the network.