Pricing Quality of Service in Diffserv IP Networks

Abstract

In order to reduce costs and make it easier to integrate disparate systems, networked and virtual organizations (NVOs) should adopt open technology standards throughout the entire organization—standard computing architectures, standard networks, and standard application interfaces. The Internet protocol (IP) technology has been foreseen as a basic networking infrastructure that supports communication requirements of NVOs. With the growing demand for the integration of heterogeneous telecommunication services (e.g., voice, data, video and multimedia), there is a strong need for deploying quality of service (QoS) in IP-based networks. Under such circumstances, the flat pricing models that have been satisfying in traditional best-effort Internet so far do not encourage users to make reasonable use of resources. QoS differentiation introduces a clear need for incentives to be offered to users to encourage them to choose the service that is most appropriate for their needs. In commercial networks, this can be most effectively achieved through pricing. Falkner, Devetsikiotis, and Lambadaris (2000) and Da Silva (2000) supplied comprehensive reviews and evaluation of pricing schemes developed during the nineties and mainly related with per-flow IP QoS approaches, such as the integrated services (IntServ) specified by Braden, Clark, and Shenker (1994). Proliferation of the differentiated services framework, since the late 90s posed a number of new issues and resulted in novel proposals for pricing IP QoS and network resources.