SmartenIT concepts and mechanisms to be presented in Singapore University of Technology and Design

Professor George D. Stamoulis from Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) will give a seminar on the "Use of Incentives' Mechanisms for Managing Internet Traffic and Cloud Resources" in Think Tank 22, on September 23rd, 2015 at the premises of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Economic mechanisms (including pricing, SLAs and auctions), address the incentives of users and service providers, each of whom responds according to his own best interest. Thus, when appropriately designed, economic mechanisms are a powerful distributed tool for the efficient allocation, management, and sharing of network resources (bandwidth, spectrum), cloud resources, digital goods (content and sensor data), and even energy goods (e.g. NegaWatts) in smart grids.  In this seminar, a brief overview of the relevant research carried out in the Network Economics and Services (NES) Group of AUEB will be presented: In particular, the problem of the formation of an economically sustainable federation of resources by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) will be discussed. A relevant queueing model will be introduced that can be employed to derive the optimal federation policy that maximizes the total profit (revenue minus cost) of CSPs, while also taking into account the incentives of individual CSPs. Moreover, recent results on the properties of the optimal policy will be presented. Next, the Inter-Cloud Communication (ICC) Traffic Management mechanism will be described, which performs rate control over the ISP transit link(s) aiming to attain a target reduction of transit cost.  Both of the above works have been carried out in the context of EU-funded project SmartenIT.