| The Internet has grown from its inception as a special-purpose internetwork into a general multi-purpose world-wide facility enabling education, commerce, governance, and societal communication, all in the space of a few decades. Over this time, and accelerating in the last decade or so, increasing demands and a growing variety of use cases are posing new challenges on the architecture prompting re-thinking and re-architecting of the network. One thread of research in such architectural considerations involves the issue of choice. The lack of alternative network services brings little economic incentive for the network service providers to make investments to deploy new technologies and improve the quality of their network services. In addition, most user flows goes through several providers, thus there is no effective mechanism in the current Internet to provide feedback to users about which provider is the cause of the performance problems they experience. One solution to these problems is to create a more competitive open market where providers can advertise their network services, and users can choose their desired set of network services to satisfy their needs. In this solution, the users have the option to choose another service if they are not satisfied. However, even in this solution, the root cause of the performance problems still can not be found and it brings us to the lack of a robust feedback capability.;In this work, we investigate a solution to this fundamental missing piece of the Internet, the measurement and verification capability of the network services offered in the Internet, that indirectly pushes more responsibility to the network providers to fulfill their requirements for high quality services. Our work, while rooted in standard expectations of economic theory, is not in economics itself. Rather, it is in defining, designing, and realizing architectural entities and interactions in technical terms that can realize verification services essential to enabling such economic interactions.;Our work is threefold; after giving a literature overview of the research on future Internet and Internet measurement, we first propose an architecture that defines the roles, interactions and design choices to enable a Choice-Based Verification Service. We then describe the results and analysis of a series of tests, which start with our work on measurement frameworks in wired and wireless environments and continue with the simulation, the mechanism introduced and the actual prototype of this work deployed into a real system, the GENI meso-scale testbed. Finally, we investigate and validate whether such informed choices with verification service actually lead to better overall results. We use energy-efficiency as a practical and useful domain for a case study and show the simulation results, which greatly increase the appeal of this work as applicable real-world network services. |
