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How to Market Manage a QoS Network
Altmann, Jorn; Daanen, Hans; Oliver, Huw; Sanchez-Beato Suarez, Alfonso
HPL-2001-242
External - Copyright Consideration
Keyword(s): pricing of network services; charging for network services; QoS pricing; DiffServ; performance modeling
Abstract: This paper describes a control mechanism for Internet traffic. It is an economic mechanism that enables users to choose different price/QoS priority levels for network services at the user time scale. User time scale means that prices vary at a rate suitable for human beings to respond to those price changes. The changes might happen on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. We believe that for this medium time scale, an economic control mechanism needs to be coupled with a technical rate control mechanism at a short time scale, in order to build a simple and cost-reducing system that can provide quality of service to end- users. We show that the approach proposed enables network service providers to react to network congestion appropriately and provides end-users with high flexibility in service selection. After discussing different pricing principles, we describe the market-managed test network, the pricing and charging software, and the experiments run on the network. We present a theoretical model based on Markov chains that can represent the proposed market- managed network. Finally, we present results from the analysis of the theoretical model as well as measurement results. We show that the behavior of such a system depends on the user's net benefit, the prices for the network service, as well as on the heterogeneity of the user pool.
11 Pages
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