Dr. Novak Has Paper Accepted for Decision Support Systems

1/20/2008

Dr. David Novak, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, had a paper accepted for publication in Decision Support Systems titled "Managing Bandwidth Allocations between Competing Recreational and Non-Recreational Traffic on Campus Networks."

The paper demonstrates a decision support methodology to set optimal bandwidth allocations for competing recreational peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing traffic and non-recreational traffic (non-P2P) with respect to minimizing the total cost of network operations. Total costs include the explicit costs to the Internet provider associated with network management, as well as the implicit costs resulting from unsatisfied users under various bandwidth allocation scenarios. Management decisions include bandwidth allocations for P2P and non-P2P traffic during specific time periods, as well as the number of allocation changes made during the day. A goal program (GP) is used to estimate both P2P capacity demand and P2P user demand at different time periods and bandwidth allocations. A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is used to solve the cost minimization problem. A real-world example for optimizing bandwidth allocations between competing P2P and non-P2P interests is provided, using empirical data from a large university.