Performance analysis for multi-service networks with congestion-based pricing for QoS traffic

There has been recent interest in employing unified pricing schemes for supporting both QoS and best-effort traffic within multi-service networks. This paper presents an analytical approach for the design and analysis of this class of network pricing control. In particular we propose an approximation method to estimate overall user value arising from all traffic types, given the routes for QoS traffic. Our approach considers admission control as both a resource allocation issue for QoS traffic, and a pricing control decision for best-effort and QoS traffic. We show how to convert the price-based admission control decision to a resource-based blocking problem. We also present the numerical results of performance analysis for multi-service networks using our proposed approximation method. Our approach can be used to predict the performance and parameter settings for a wide range of combined QoS and best-effort pricing schemes.