Emerging new applications demand the current Internet to provide new functionalities. Although many future Internet architectures and protocols have been proposed to fulfill such needs, ISPs have been reluctant to deploy many of these architectures. We believe technical issues are not the main reasons as many of these new proposals are technically sound. In this paper, we take an economic perspective and seek to answer: Why do most new Internet architectures fail to be deployed? How can the deployability of a new architecture be enhanced? We develop a game-theoretic model to characterize the outcome of an architecture’s deployment through the equilibrium of ISPs’ decisions. This model enables us to: (1) analyze several key factors of the deployability of a new architecture such as the number of critical ISPs and the change of routing path; (2) explain the deploying outcomes of some previously proposed architectures/protocols such as IPv6, DiffServ, CDN, etc., and shed light on the “Internet flattening phenomenon”; (3) predict the deployability of a new architecture such as NDN, and compare its deployability with competing architectures. Our study suggests that the difficulty to deploy a new Internet architecture comes from the “coordination” of distributed ISPs. Finally, we design a mechanism to enhance the deployability of new architectures.

中文翻译：

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通过经济模型量化未来互联网架构的可部署性和可演化性


新的应用不断涌现，要求当前的互联网提供新的功能。尽管已经提出了许多未来的互联网架构和协议来满足此类需求，但 ISP 一直不愿意部署其中许多架构。我们认为技术问题并不是主要原因，因为许多新提案在技术上都是合理的。在本文中，我们从经济学的角度来寻求答案：为什么大多数新的互联网架构都无法部署？如何增强新架构的可部署性？我们开发了一个博弈论模型，通过 ISP 决策的平衡来描述架构部署的结果。该模型使我们能够：（1）分析新架构可部署性的几个关键因素，例如关键ISP的数量和路由路径的变化； （2）解释一些先前提出的架构/协议（例如IPv6、DiffServ、CDN等）的部署结果，并阐明“互联网扁平化现象”； (3)预测NDN等新架构的可部署性，并将其与竞争架构的可部署性进行比较。我们的研究表明，部署新的互联网架构的困难来自于分布式ISP的“协调”。最后，我们设计了一种机制来增强新架构的可部署性。