Users' responsiveness in the price-controlled best-effort QoS model
Among different Quality of Service models for packet-switched networks, a price-controlled best-effort model introduces the idea of usage sensitive or variable pricing. One of the main issues is the problem of dynamic price determination. The effective price determination mechanism should avoid delays in establishing the price, should report a new state to the end-systems and should incorporate algorithms to avoid the traffic of packets, which would be rejected later in the network. We show in this paper that such a price determination algorithm can be developed in a relatively simple and effective manner if users' responsiveness to price changes is taken into account. Furthermore, we develop a framework for a dynamical statistical estimation of the users' responsiveness. The responsiveness and price calculation algorithm proposed is decentralised to the level of a particular network resource. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
pricing packet-switched networks price-controlled best-effort model