Congestion based resource sharing in multi-service networks

The internet traffic is increasingly composed of streams of packets with very diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements: from those containing standard, best-effort traffic, such as e-mail or http sessions, to internet telephony and high-quality video streaming demanding dedicated allocation of network capacity. However, while methods based on externality pricing exist to offer socially optimal prices to the groups of users demanding different grades of the best-effort service class, less attention has been devoted to the implementation of such pricing models to the improvement of network resources allocation in a multi-service setting (i.e., a network offering various grades of both guaranteed and best-effort level of service). This paper addresses the problem through an end-to-end approach that combines a congestion-based pricing model for resource sharing with a QoS network model, based on admission rules. We describe a measurement-based approach for QoS path pricing that results in improved resource allocation policies between QoS and best-effort traffic. We also present the results of a large-scale simulation study that shows how this pricing scheme increases both end user value and system throughput with low computational overhead. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.