The Internet of symmetric traffic flows between networks and a hierarchical topology, has long given way to one with significantly asymmetric traffic flows and a flatter topology. The Internet topology of today may be characterized as having three key types of networks—content providers, user access providers, and transit providers. In this Internet, best-effort routing of centrally stored content using distributed protocols has been seen to be inadequate to provide a suitably reliable transport service with the requisite quality of service to the end user. Two important developments that mitigate this gap in the capability of the traditional Internet and the needs of modern content are (i) direct peering arrangements between content networks and ISPs, and (ii) widespread use of content distribution networks (CDNs), who also peer with ISPs. In this paper we first analyze the economics of such peering arrangements. Using microeconomic models from the industrial organization literature, we first develop the conditions for a content provider to connect directly to a service provider, possibly via a peering link. Further, when such a direct link is indeed sought, we analyze the quality of the link vis-a-vis the default option of using a transit service. We then extend our results to the case of CDN, and analyze the content provider market coverage by CDNs. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results on the objectives sought by net neutrality regimes.

We consider an ad hoc network where multiple users access the same set of channels. The channel characteristics are unknown and could be different for each user (heterogeneous). No controller is available to coordinate channel selections by the users, and if multiple users select the same channel, they collide and none of them receive any rate (or reward). For such a completely decentralized network we develop algorithms that aim to achieve optimal network throughput. Due to lack of any direct communication between the users, we allow each user to exchange information by transmitting in a specific pattern and sense such transmissions from others. However, such transmissions and sensing for information exchange do not add to network throughput. For the wideband sensing and narrowband sensing scenarios, we first develop explore-and-commit algorithms that converge to near-optimal allocation with high probability in a small number of rounds. Building on this, we develop an algorithm that gives logarithmic regret. We validate our claims through extensive experiments and show that our algorithms perform significantly better than the state-of-the-art CSM-MAB, dE3and dE3-TS algorithms.