Patrick Maillé

IMT Atlantique | IMT · SRCD

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), in parallel with the substantial reduction in the cost of connected devices, have enabled the deployment of sensors in large scale. As sensors become more densely packed, they often provide similar data due to their proximity. In this paper, we aim to identify such similarities among sensors base...

This paper deals with the hot and sensitive network neutrality debate. It designs a model simultaneously encompassing several scenarios regarding the content-providing market structure: a monopolistic content provider, competitive ones, and a vertically-integrated one facing a non vertically-integrated competitor. We each time compare the outputs w...

Content providers (CPs) are generally on the “pro-neutrality” side of the debate, but in this chapter, we develop the idea that (some) content providers may not always be so inclined to defend net neutrality: non-neutrality may help incumbent CPs to remain in place by raising the barrier to entry, even if this means paying a fee for that purpose, o...

This chapter gives and compares several existing definitions of network neutrality, highlighting the different interpretations. It discusses the possible restrictions to neutrality brought by so-called specialized services and zero rating. It then reviews the heterogeneous worldwide regulatory implementations.

Network neutrality has become a long-lasting debate. This chapter aims at presenting the context, the evolving networking ecosystem, and examples of service limitations that have ignited reactions and sparked the debate. It describes how multidisciplinary the issue is and introduces the rest of the book.

This chapter lists the arguments in favor and against neutrality, based on different high-level goals, each goal-freedom, investment, competition, security/privacy, and welfare-being discussed from both sides of the debate.

Setting rules cannot be effective without monitoring the activity of ICT actors: How to sanction non-appropriate behaviors and be proactive against new conducts without measurements? Chapter 9 explains why this is challenging and what tools are currently available.

We develop here the idea that applying neutrality principles to ISPs’ actions on Internet packets may be too restrictive, due to there being many potential ways to circumvent the (packet-based) neutrality laws, and because the content delivery chain now involves many other (non-ISP) intermediaries which may be non-neutral and impact quality of serv...

This chapter gives more insight on the role and possible non-neutral behavior of a particular and important intermediate actor between content and user, namely, search engines, leading to another debate called the search neutrality debate.

The purpose of this chapter is to point out that the so-called common sense may be dangerous concerning neutrality (or non-neutrality) ideas or decisions. This is done through the design and analysis of mathematical models using the framework of non-cooperative game theory, which studies the interactions between selfish actors. We first recall the...

This chapter focuses on another set of actors, namely, e-commerce platforms and social networks, and investigates how they can influence users’ actions and opinions. The questions we raise regard the need or relevance of including them in a more general debate on neutrality. We link that issue to the debate on the transparency of algorithms, which...

In current monitoring solutions, each application involves a customed deployment and requires significant configuration efforts to adapt to changes in the sensor field. In contrast, here we consider a massive deployment of battery-powered sensors temporarily intervening in the monitoring. In this paper, we propose a generic general-purpose monitori...

In today's monitoring solutions, each application involves custom deployment and requires significant configuration efforts to accommodate sensor changes. In contrast, in this paper, a massive deployment of battery-powered sensors is considered and we propose a more versatile monitoring solution that is not tied to physical device deployment. We ch...

The search neutrality debate stems from content or service providers complaining about being discriminated and ranked unfairly low by search engines, raising the need for methodologies and tools to verify bias in search engine rankings. For that purpose, we propose in this paper a simple yet effective framework based on the comparison of the result...

Network Neutrality is protected by law in many countries over the world, but monitoring has to be performed to ensure operators conform to the rules. The Wehe application, jointly developed by Northeastern University and the French regulator ARCEP, allows users to take measurements and analyze them to detect possible traffic differentiation.

Licensed shared access is a new sharing concept that allows Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to share the 2.3–2.4 GHz bandwidth with its owner. This sharing can be done after obtaining a license from the regulator. The allocation is made among groups such that two base stations in the same group can use the same spectrum simultaneously. In this cont...

Licensed Shared Access (LSA) is a new sharing approach that aims to optimize the use of the 2.3-2.4 Ghz frequency band in order to support the deployment of 5G systems. Under LSA, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) can share the 2.3-2.4 band with the incumbent of that band under some guarantees, specified in a license attributed by the regulator. In t...

There is a trend for big content providers such as Netflix and YouTube to give grades to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), to incentivize those ISPs to improve at least the quality offered to their service. We design in this paper a model analyzing ISPs’ optimal allocation strategies in a competitive context and in front of quality-sensitive users...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of delaying delay-tolerant calls under certain conditions in cellular networks. We propose to queue the call if the user agrees when the terminal has bad radio conditions and the system is loaded. The call is served as soon as radio conditions become good or the current load goes below a given threshold. We mode...

Licensed Shared Access (LSA) is a new concept proposed by the radio spectrum policy group in order to optimize spectrum usage: a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) can access temporarily to other incumbent's spectrum after obtaining a license.The licensing process is made via an auction mechanism. The mechanisms proposed in the literature for the LSA co...

The network neutrality debate has been raging worldwide for around fifteen years now. Our goal in this paper is to model and discuss a quite recent option which could be seen as a trade-off between neutrality and differentiation operated by Internet service providers (ISPs), and satisfy both ends of the world: differentiation potentially chosen by...

In an ad hoc network, accessing a point depends on the participation of other, intermediate, nodes. Each node behaving selfishly, we end up with a non-cooperative game where each node incurs a cost for providing a reliable connection but whose success depends not only on its own reliability investment but also on the investment of nodes which can b...

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Working Group has developed the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) framework to enable IPv6 over LPWAN. In order to support 1280-byte packets, as required for IPv6, SCHC includes a fragmentation functionality, since relevant LPWAN technologies offer very short data...

This paper analyzes the economic feasibility of a business model for multi-Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), which is an envisioned scenario in mobile telecommunications markets supported by 5G networks. A business model for the provision of service to end-users through an MVNO using the infrastructure su...

Licensed Shared Access (LSA) is a complementary solution allowing Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to use another incumbents frequency spectrum after obtaining a proper license from the regulator. Using auctions to allocate those LSA-type licenses is a natural approach toward an efficient use of spectrum, by controlling the incentives for MNOs to de...

Network neutrality is being discussed worldwide, with different countries applying different policies, some imposing it, others acting against regulation or even repealing it as recently in the USA. The goal of this paper is to model and analyze the interactions of users, content providers, and Internet service providers (ISPs) located in countries...

LoRaWAN is a recently proposed MAC layer protocol which manages communications between LoRa-based gateways and end-devices. It has attracted much scientific attention due its physical layer characteristics, but mainly due to its versatile configuration parameters. However, it is known that LoRaWAN-based transmissions suffer from extensive collision...

Different search engines provide different outputs for the same keyword. This may be due to different definitions of relevance, to different ranking aggregation methods, and/or to different knowledge/anticipation of users' preferences, but rankings are also suspected to be biased towards own content, which may prejudicial to other content providers...

Community networks have emerged as an alternative to licensed band systems (WiMAX, 4G, etc.), providing an access to the Internet with Wi-fi technology while covering large areas. A community network is easy and cheap to deploy, as the network is using members’ access points in order to cover the area. We study the competition between a community o...

With wireless sponsored data, a third party, content or service provider, can pay for some of your data traffic so that it is not counted in your plan’s monthly cap. This type of behavior is currently under scrutiny, with telecommunication regulators wondering if it could be applied to prevent competitors from entering the market and what the impac...

Licensed shared access is a new frequency sharing concept that allows mobile network operators (MNOs) to use some of the spectrum initially allocated to other incumbents, after obtaining a temporary license from the regulator. The allocation is made among groups such that two base stations in the same group can use the same spectrum simultaneously....

Licensed shared access (LSA) is a new approach that allows Mobile Network Operators to use a portion of the spectrum initially licensed to another incumbent user, by obtaining a license from the regulator via an auction mechanism. In this context, different truthful auction mechanisms have been proposed, and differ in terms of allocation (who gets...

Important changes in electricity consumption model require a communication network within the electrical grid, which is called the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) that can handle the increase of multiple and fluctuating production sites. Recently, we witness the convergence of this communication network and the electricity network into what...

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) faces multiple challenges to achieve high reliability, low-latency and low power consumption. The IEEE 802.15.4 Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) protocol aims to address these issues by using frequency hopping to improve the transmission quality when coping with low-quality channels. However, an optimized...

Advertisement in dedicated webpage spaces or in search engines sponsored slots is usually sold using auctions, with a payment rule that is either per impression or per click. But advertisers can be both sensitive to being viewed (brand awareness effect) and being clicked (conversion into sales). In this paper, we generalize the auction mechanism by...

Different search engines provide different outputs for the same keyword. This may be due to different definitions of relevance, and/or to different knowledge/anticipation of users' preferences, but rankings are also suspected to be biased towards own content, which may prejudicial to other content providers. In this paper, we make some initial step...

The use of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) is growing due to their advantages in terms of low cost, energy efficiency and range. Although LPWANs attract the interest of industry and network operators, it faces certain constraints related to energy consumption, network coverage and quality of service. In this paper we demonstrate the possibili...

LoRa networks enable long range communications for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The current LoRa technology provides a wide range of communication settings whereas many combination settings are orthogonal and, thus, they can be successfully decoded at the gateway when the signals are transmitted simultaneously. Previous simulation results...

In order to track the users who illegally re-stream live video streams, one solution is to embed identified watermark sequences in the video segments to distinguish the users. However, since all types of watermarked segments should be prepared, the existing solutions require an extra cost of bandwidth for delivery (at least multiplying by two the r...

The optimization of LoRa transmission is cast as a reinforcement learning problem: several Multi-Armed bandit algorithms are compared with Adaptive Data Rate, which is the algorithm defined in LoRa Network. On experiments done on a realistic LoRa Network simulator, ADR is dominated by MAB both in terms of energy consumption and packet losses.

Selfish primary user emulation (PUE) is a serious security problem in cognitive radio networks. By emitting emulated incumbent signals, a PUE attacker can selfishly occupy more channels. Consequently, a PUE attacker can prevent other secondary users from accessing radio resources and interfere with nearby primary users. To mitigate the selfish PUE,...

Complementing the current paradigm change from QoS to QoE, we address fundamental QoE charging issues for Internet services from an end user perspective. Here, key issues arise from gaps of different information contexts involved, which have to be managed when introducing a QoE product. Hence, this paper analyzes the double role of prices for quali...

The search neutrality debate is about whether search engines should or should not be allowed to uprank certain results among the organic content matching a query. This debate is related to that of network neutrality , which focuses on whether all bytes being transmitted through the Internet should be treated equally. In a recent paper, we have form...

Major content/service providers are publishing grades they give to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) about the quality of delivery of their content. The goal is to inform customers about the “best” ISPs. But this could be an incentive for, or even a pressure on, ISPs to differentiate service and provide a better quality to those big content provide...

To address the problem of illegal re-streaming of video streams, existing solutions are based on watermarking the legal video to track the leak users who re-stream the stream on illegal platform. However, these solutions do not aim at tracking leaks as fast as possible, nor are adaptive to the number of users. We present a CDN-based adaptive delive...

The evolution of the power grid towards the so-called Smart Grid, where information technologies help improve the efficiency of electricity production, distribution and consumption, allows to use the fine-grained control brought by the Internet of Things capabilities to perform distributed demand response when requested by the grid. In this paper,...

Network neutrality is often advocated by content providers, stressing that side payments to Internet Service Providers would hinder innovation. However, we also observe some content providers actually paying those fees. This paper intends to explain such behaviors through economic modeling, illustrating how side payments can be a way for an incumbe...

Content delivery networks (CDNs) have become key telecommunication actors. They contribute to improve significantly the quality of services delivering content to end users. However, their impact on the ecosystem raises concerns about their “fairness,” and therefore the question of their inclusion in the neutrality debates, becomes relevant. This pa...

This paper models a non-cooperative game between two EV charging stations. One is a fixed-power charging station purchasing electricity from the grid at wholesale price and reselling the energy to EV owners at a higher retail price; the other is regulation-providing and varies the recharging power level of its clients to provide regulation services...

Telecommunication networks are generally dimensioned to provide services with small delays and high throughput during peak-periods. Due to the sizable difference in the network utilization between the peak and off-peak periods as well as the requirements of robust performance in face of both traffic burstiness and various types of network failures,...

This paper models a non-cooperative game between two EV charging stations. One is a fixed-power charging station purchasing electricity from the grid at wholesale price and reselling the energy to EV owners at a higher retail price; the other is regulation-providing and varies the recharging power level of its clients to provide regulation services...

Primary User Emulation Attack (PUEA), in which attackers emulate primary user signals causing restriction of secondary access on the attacked channels, is a serious security problem in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs). An user performing a PUEA for selfishly occupying more channels is called a selfish PUEA attacker. Network managers could adopt a su...

The soaring electricity demand due to Electric Vehicles (EVs) increases the urgency of the evolution from the power grid to the so-called smart grid, to manage demand peaks with minimal infrastructure costs.

This paper studies the effects on user welfare of imposing network neutrality, using a game-theoretic model of provider interactions based on a two-sided market framework: we assume that the platform--the last-mile access providers (ISPs)--are monopolists, and consider content providers (CPs) entry decisions. All decisions affect the choices made b...

Electric Vehicles (EVs), as their penetration increases, are not only challenging the sustainability of the power grid, but also stimulating and promoting its upgrading. Indeed, EVs can actively reinforce the development of the Smart Grid if their charging processes are properly coordinated through two-way communications, possibly benefiting all ty...

The network neutrality debate originally stems from the growing trac asymmetry between ISPs, questioning the established peering or transit agreements. That tendency is due to popular content providers connected to the network through a single ISP, and whose trac is not charged by distant ISPs. We propose in this paper to review the economic transi...

Electric Vehicles (EV) are drawing tremendous attention, as part of the transition toward environment-friendly transportation. While EV recharging represents a considerable extra load on the grid, they also offer new opportunities in terms of consumption flexibility. In this paper, we use the recharging process of EVs to provide regulation to the g...

Depuis une vingtaine d'années, les évolutions technologiques dans les domaines de l'informatique et des réseaux ont conduit à des bouleversements dans les services réseaux et leurs usages, mais également dans les rapports de force entre les différents acteurs impliqués. De nombreux participants interviennent généralement pour fournir un service rés...

In the Internet, the data charging scheme has usually been flat rate. But more recently, especially for mobile data traffic, we have seen more diversity in the pricing offers, such as volume-based ones or cap-based ones. We propose in this paper to study the behavior of heterogeneous users facing two offers: a volume-based one and a flat-rate one....

One of the most promising techniques to drastically reduce the energy consumption of cellular networks is the use of sleep-mode (SM) methods: when the traffic load is low, some components of the network, such as a base station (BS), can be switched off. In this case, the traffic load is managed by BSs that stay on. In this paper, we investigate how...

We study the interactions among Internet providers in vehicular networks which offer access to commuters via road side units (RSUs). Namely, we propose a game-theoretical framework to model the competition on prices between vehicular Internet providers to capture the largest amount of users, thus selfishly maximizing the revenues. The equilibria of...

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are major actors of the current telecommunication ecosystem. Our goal in this paper is to study their impact on other actors of the supply chain, especially on content innovation which is a key concern in the network neutrality debate where CDNs' role seems forgotten. Our findings indicate that vertically integratin...

Network neutrality has been topic of discussion for the past 25 years, with current legislation/ regulation in the United States and Europe targeting the ISPs or “common carriers.” But the reality of the Internet in the 2010s is that various actors contribute to the delivery of data, with sometimes contradictory objectives. In this article, we high...

The growing importance of Content Delivery Network (CDN) in the value chain of content delivery raises concerns about the 'neutrality' of these players. We propose in this paper a model to analyze the impact of revenue-oriented CDN management policies on the fairness of the competition among two content providers that use CDN services to deliver co...

The search neutrality debate questions the ranking methods of search engines. We analyze the issue when content providers offer content for free, but get revenues-from advertising. We investigate the noncooperative game among competing content providers under different ranking policies. When the search engine is not involved with high-quality conte...

The availability of end devices of peer-to-peer storage and backup systems has been shown to be critical for usability and for system reliability in practice. This has led to the adoption of hybrid architectures composed of both peers and servers. Such architectures mask the instability of peers thus approaching the performances of client-server sy...

This paper investigates the economic impact and strategies of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Internet actors that reduce the capacity needs in the backbone network and improve the quality perceived by users. We consider so-called push and pull models where the traffic is paid by the sender or the receiver, respectively, as well as the situation...

The network reconfiguration (NR) techniques are key strategies to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. In this paper we propose a mechanism to further increase the energy gains resulting of the application of these strategies. Our approach exploits the delay tolerance of the users to increase the periods when no reconfiguration is ne...

Vehicular networks, besides supporting safety-oriented applications, are nowadays expected to provide effective communication infrastructure also for supporting leisure-oriented application including content sharing, gaming and Internet access on the move. This work focuses on Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) scenarios, where multiple content provid...

Le 3 Avril 2014, le Parlement européen a apporté une définition " claire et sans ambiguïté " de la neutralité du Net; il semble sous-entendu que la neutralité est préservée par ce texte de loi. Cependant, en restant neutres vis-à-vis du débat sous-jacent, nous pensons que l'écosystème Internet est suffisamment complexe pour que la réponse proposée...

Presenting a balance of theory and practice, this up-to-date guide provides a comprehensive overview of the key issues in telecommunication network economics, as well as the mathematical models behind the solutions. These mathematical foundations enable the reader to understand the econom