Pricing and admission control for QoS-enabled Internet

Over the past ten years, many pricing schemes have been proposed for a QoS-enabled network. Most of the proposed QoS-pricing schemes focus on congestion-sensitive pricing and optimal pricing solutions. Integrating pricing and admission control has not been studied in details. In this paper, we pay more attention to the interrelation between pricing and admission control in QoS-enabled networks and propose a tariff-based architecture framework that flexibly integrates pricing and admission control for multi-domain DiffServ networks. We study the pricing and user behaviors in detail and design a market-regulated pricing and admission control scheme in our framework. We model the system as a market so that the price of a service class reflects the resource availability inside the network and is regulated by the market itself. We also evaluate our pricing strategy and admission control scheme through simulations. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.