We consider a Web server that can provide differentiated services to clients with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. The Web server can provide N greater than or equal to 1 classes of proportional-delay differentiated services ( PDDS) to heterogeneous clients. An operator can specify fixed performance spacings between classes, namely, r(i,i+1) > 1, for i = 1,..., N - 1. Requests in class i + 1 are guaranteed to have an average waiting time which is 1/r(i,i+1) of the average waiting time of class i requests. With PDDS, we can provide consistent performance spacings over a wide range of system loading and this simplifies many pricing issues. In addition, each client can specify a maximum average waiting time requirement to be guaranteed by the PDDS-enabled Web server. We show that, in general, the problem of assigning clients to service classes in order to optimize system efficacy is NP-complete. We propose two efficient admission control algorithms so that a Web server can provide the QoS guarantees and, at the same time, classify each client to its "lowest" admissible class, resulting in lowest usage cost for the admitted client. We also consider how to perform end-point dynamic adaptation such that admitted clients can submit requests at a lower class and further reduce their usage costs without violating their QoS requirements. We propose two dynamic adaptation algorithms: one is server-based and the other is client-based. The client-based adaptation is distributed and is based on a noncooperative game technique. We carry out experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of these algorithms under different utility functions and traffic arrival patterns (e.g., Poisson, MMPP, and Pareto). We report extensive experimental results to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
