A la Carte: An Economic Framework for Multi-ISP Service Quality

Internet quality of service is required by many applications such as interactive voice and video that could fuel the further growth of the network, but it is not widely available to end-users. While ISPs are providing QoS within VPNs, end-hosts connected to the public Internet and linked by paths that cross multiple ISPs can do little to influence the quality of the service for their traffic. The core observation is that the existing contracts between networks are an obstacle to multi-ISP service quality because remote ISPs on the path of the traffic have no incentive to provide good service when needed.