Surname: Crowcroft

Name: Jon

Title: Professor

Organisation: UCL

Contact	details	(address, phone, fax, e-mail):

Department of Computer Science,	UCL
020 7679 7296
j.crowcroft@cs.ucl.ac.uk

Project	Name: Pricing Networks
(with the M3i project, Hewlett Packard,	British	Telecom	and the	University of California
Berkeley)

Project	description (500 words maximum):

The M3i	project	at UCL is part of ongoing research into	pricing	the Internet.

Further	details	are at:

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/pricing/

The work to date has had to be somewhat	academic (apart	from case studies of ISPs and
Mobile Telephone tariffing strategies).	However, the unconstrained demand for more and
more capacity is putting pressure on IP	providers to come up with mechanisms to	change
users behaviour. To date, SuperJANET has typically provided free national services.
Internationally	(where audio and video communications would increase collaboration and
reduce travel costs), there is a usage charge but it is	very coarse grained and	does not
relate to the Quality of Service. In M3i we have developed several ways	to allow end-
system only cost recovery provided that	the network service can	deliver	congestion
signals. Packet	loss is	adequate in extremis but ECN and diff-serve with at least two
service	levels would improve the accuracy of our approach.

We would very much like	to try out our ideas with a real user base - one example might
be the GRID, which we expect to	dominate (and distort) demand in the near future. This
is a well defined and generally	quite well funded community which should not object to a
more efficient and transparent accounting system for their network usage. However,
almost any user	group in the UK	that works with	researchers in the US would be useful
(e.g. digital library researchers, medical, etc.).

This work would	be relatively inexpensive, since we already have the activities	and
resources. We only need	permission to deploy these and modest resources	to support
users.


Is it an Internet2 project (Yes/No): Yes

US partner required or have (if	so, please name	US organisation): University of
California Berkeley

Bandwidth requirements:	2Mbps

Funding	requirements: 50K

Other requirements: