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A network is not owned by any single entity; its various parts may be under the control of different network providers. Whenever a data stream has to be sent from a sender to receiver then it has to cross the physical infrastructure of several owners. So, a global standardized pricing fails to create any sort of agreement among the organizations possessing traffic right of different places. This is an important research problem (Gupta, Stahl, & Whinston, 1999). Although designing such economic solutions in today’s era of fast paced technology driven world is a cumbersome task but using the economic theories for the same will surely provide valuable support.
Figure 1. Evolution of DDoS attacks
The level of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements expected by the users depend majorly on the kind of service want to be offered like high download speeds, quality of video and audio etc. This QoS level is described by three attributes- packet loss, bandwidth and delay. The QoS is application based which means that the scenario differences according to the application. E-mail service does not expect correct order delivery of packets, all it wants is that the message should be delivered without any loss of data whereas in the case of gaming applications the correct ordered delivery of packets is necessary to maintain a consistent flow of audio and video. The QoS depends on the context of use by customers like although the ordered delivery of packets is not the requirement of e-mail service but the instant notification on arrival of any email is to be ensured. It also depends on the urgency of the task like instant download of files versus delayed download of files, for instant download the bandwidth availability must be enhanced and there is a constant variation in the quantity of packets being transmitted over a channel. So the pricing mechanism must be designed in accordance with the traffic generated. This needs to be accompanied by a fixed slab charge to ensure that enough revenue is generated to keep the services running.
The provision of incentives is necessary to prevent users from behaving dishonestly. The users should not be lured to the idea of masking their email message as a multimedia message to gain a higher priority on the network. Such tasks should be discouraged. This explains the need of pricing policies and incentives. Figure 1 explains the evolution of DDoS attacks over time (Adat et al., 2018; Gupta et al., 2016; Chhabra et al., 2013; Negi et al., 2013; Alomari et al., 2012). It depicts the need of incentive mechanisms in cooperative schemes. The current strategy for defense demands collaboration among defenders which is the motivation to design a fair policy scheme. Among many parameters on which the network performance depends, the main game-changer has been the resource allocation (Bailey, 1997). Application of concepts of economics will certainly help in improving the management of network. This is a lesser-explored field which will combine basics of economics and computer networks. For allocation of resources either the limits can be put on the quantity of the resource used or some pricing strategy can be defined if the user wants more resources than the allocated quantity. Putting a limit on the quantity of resources allocated requires a central authority to monitor the same. Although the advantage being lesser accounting costs.