On the feasibility of dynamic congestion-based pricing in differentiated services networks

ABSTRACT

Differentiated services can ensure that traffic on some codepoints receives higher quality of service (QoS) than traffic on other codepoints, but without additional mechanisms it cannot target any particular QoS. Congestion-based pricing has been suggested as a method to target QoS in other network architectures. Here, we investigate whether congestion-based pricing can be used to control aggregate traffic into each codepoint by motivating users to choose the codepoints appropriate for each application. We first ask what information needs to be exchanged; we assert that both price and QoS information must be available for users to make decisions. We then ask how effective congestion-based pricing in diffServ can be; we find that it is feasible only for networks with sufficiently high bandwidth to guarantee that QoS can be quickly measured.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ron Cocchi , Scott Shenker , Deborah Estrin , Lixia Zhang, Pricing in computer networks: motivation, formulation, and example, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.1 n.6, p.614-627, Dec. 1993 [doi>10.1109/90.266050]
• 2: Andrew Odlyzko, Paris metro pricing for the internet, Proceedings of the 1st ACM conference on Electronic commerce, p.140-147, November 03-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/336992.337030]
• 3: C. Courcoubetis and V. Siris, "Managing and pricing service level agreements for differentiated services," in 7th Int. Workshop on QoS, 1999, pp. 165-173.
• 4: P. Marbach, "Pricing priority classes in a differentiated services network," presented at the Allerton Conf. Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, 1999.
• 5: A. Orda and N. Shimkin, "Incentive pricing in multiclass systems," Telecommun. Syst., vol. 13, pp. 241-267, 2000.
• 6: P. Marbach, "Pricing differentiated services networks: Bursty traffic," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2001, pp. 650-658.
• 7: J. Altmann, H. Daanen, H. Oliver, and A. S.-B. Suárez, "How to market-manage a QoS network," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2002, pp. 284-293.
• 8: Peter Marbach, Priority service and max-min fairness, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.11 n.5, p.733-746, October 2003 [doi>10.1109/TNET.2003.818196]
• 9: N. Semret, R. Liao, A. Campbell, and A. A. Lazar, "Pricing, provisioning and peering: Dynamic markets for differentiated internet services and implications for network interconnections," IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 2499-2513, Dec. 2001.
• 10: E. W. Fulp and D. S. Reeves, "Optimal provisioning and pricing of differentiated services using QoS class promotion," in Proc. INFORMATIK: Workshop on Advanced Internet Charging and QoS Technology, 2001.
• 11: Alok Gupta , Dale O. Stahl , Andrew B. Whinston, Priority pricing of integrated services networks, Internet economics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997
• 12: L. He and J. Walrand, "Pricing differentiated Internet services," in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2005, pp. 195-204.
• 13: Kihong Park , Meera Sitharam , Shaogang Chen, Quality of service provision in noncooperative networks: heterogenous preferences, multi-dimensional QoS vectors, and burstiness, Proceedings of the first international conference on Information and computation economies, p.111-127, October 25-28, 1998, Charleston, South Carolina, United States [doi>10.1145/288994.289022]
• 14: J. K. MacKie-Mason and H. Varian, "Pricing congestible resources," IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 1141-1149, Sep. 1995.
• 15: H. Jiang and S. Jordan, "The role of price in the connection establishment process," Eur. Trans. Telecommun., vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 421-429, Jul.-Aug. 1995.
• 16: Costas Courcoubetis , Richard Weber, Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and Modelling (Wiley Interscience Series in Systems and Optimization), John Wiley & Sons, 2003
• 17: Nan Jin , Gayathri Venkitachalam , Scott Jordan, Dynamic congestion-based pricing of bandwidth and buffer, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.13 n.6, p.1233-1246, December 2005 [doi>10.1109/TNET.2005.861252]
• 18: F. Kelly, A. Maulloo, and D. Tan, "Rate control for communication networks: Shadow prices, proportional fairness and stability," J. Oper. Res. Soc., vol. 49, pp. 237-252, 1998.
• 19: Steven H. Low , David E. Lapsley, Optimization flow control—I: basic algorithm and convergence, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.7 n.6, p.861-874, Dec. 1999 [doi>10.1109/90.811451]
• 20: Richard J. La , Venkat Anantharam, Utility-based rate control in the Internet for elastic traffic, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.10 n.2, April 2002
• 21: Rayadurgam Srikant, The Mathematics of Internet Congestion Control (Systems and Control: Foundations and Applications), SpringerVerlag, 2004
• 22: Tansu Alpcan , Tamer Basar, A globally stable adaptive congestion control scheme for internet-style networks with delay, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.13 n.6, p.1261-1274, December 2005 [doi>10.1109/TNET.2005.860099]
• 23: Haïkel Yaïche , Ravi R. Mazumdar , Catherine Rosenberg, A game theoretic framework for bandwidth allocation and pricing in broadband networks, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.8 n.5, p.667-678, Oct. 2000 [doi>10.1109/90.879352]
• 24: Xi-Ren Cao , Hong-Xia Shen , Rodolfo Milito , Patrica Wirth, Internet pricing with a game theoretical approach: concepts and examples, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.10 n.2, April 2002
• 25: Jingyu Qiu , Edward W. Knightly, Measurement-based admission control with aggregate traffic envelopes, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.9 n.2, p.199-210, April 2001 [doi>10.1109/90.917076]
• 26: Costas A. Courcoubetis , Antonis Dimakis , George D. Stamoulis, Traffic equivalence and substitution in a multiplexer with applications to dynamic available capacity estimation, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.10 n.2, April 2002
• 27: Lee Breslau , Scott Shenker, Best-effort versus reservations: a simple comparative analysis, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '98 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.3-16, August 31-September 04, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 28: L.-T. Park, J.-W. Baek, and W.-K. J. Hong, "Management of service level agreements for multimedia Internet service using a utility model," IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 100-106, May 2001.
• 29: R. K. Sundaram, A First Course in Optimization Theory. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996.
• 30: J. Rosen, "Existence and uniqueness of equilibrium points for concave N-person games," Econometrica, vol. 33, pp. 520-534, 1965.
• 31: D. P. Bertsekas, Nonlinear Programming, 2nd ed. Belmont, MA: Athena Scientific, 1999.
• 32: Krzysztof Pawlikowski, Steady-state simulation of queueing processes: survey of problems and solutions, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.22 n.2, p.123-170, June 1990 [doi>10.1145/78919.78921]
• 33: G. S. Fishman and L. S. Yarberry, "An implementation of the batch means method," INFORMS J. Comput., vol. 9, pp. 296-310, 1997.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Network communications

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations
          Subjects: Network management
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Performance attributes

  G. Mathematics of Computing
  G.1 NUMERICAL ANALYSIS
      G.1.6 Optimization

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.4 System Management
          Subjects: Quality assurance

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Management, Performance

Keywords:
differentiated services, pricing, quality of service (QoS)