Best workshop paper award at the IEEE ECOFEC 2019 by members of Teaching and Research Staff of AUEB’s Department of Informatics

Members of Teaching and Research Staff of AUEB’s Department of Informatics received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE workshop on Economics of Fog, Edge and Cloud Computing (ECOFEC) 2019, in conjunction with IEEE INFOCOM, a conference for communications and computer systems, held in Paris from 28 April to 2 May 2019.

The paper that won the award is entitled "Economics of Investment and Use of Shared Network Infrastructures" and is co-authored by Iordanis Koutsopoulos (Associate Professor of the Department of Informatics and member of MMlab), Aggeliki Anastopoulou (PhD Candidate and member of STEcon lab) and Merkourios Karaliopoulos (postdoctoral researcher and member of MMlab).

The work deals with innovative mathematical models and economic mechanisms on how different entities (such as service providers) can invest and cooperatively build a telecommunications network infrastructure, which they can then use together to deploy services. In particular, the work demonstrates that if a network coordinator allocates to the entities the overall benefit from provisioned services in a specific way, then the entities’ selfish behavior on how they invest in the ends up in the same investment policy as the one resulting from full cooperation of the entities. This result shows that this profit allocation mechanism may be generalized and used as a means to eliminate selfish behaviors and to align them towards common interest.