ChoiceNet: Toward an economy plane for the internet

The Internet has been a key enabling technology for many new distributed applications and services. However, the de- ployment of new protocols and services in the Internet in- frastructure itself has been sluggish, especially where eco- nomic incentives for network providers are unclear. In our work, we seek to develop an "economy plane" for the In- ternet that enables network providers to offer new network- based services (QoS, storage, etc.) for sale to customers. The explicit connection between economic relationships and network services across various time scales enables users to select among service alternatives. The resulting competition among network service providers will lead to overall better technological solutions and more competitive prices. In this paper, we present the architectural aspects of our ChoiceNet economy plane as well as some of the technological problems that need to be addressed in a practical deployment.