Exploring Traffic Pricing for the Virtual Private Network

This paper explores the implementation issues of network traffic pricing in Internet-based virtual Private Networks (VPNs). A simplified VPN traffic-pricing formula is derived for optimizing VPN bandwidth service welfare. We provide price formulae for both prioritized first-in-first-out bandwidth scheduling and non-prioritized round-robin bandwidth scheduling. A transaction-level pricing architecture based on proxy server technology is proposed, and a prototype traffic-pricing system, VPN Traffic-Pricing Experiment System (VTPES), has been developed to test the transaction-level pricing architecture and examine the pricing formula. Experiments conducted with VTPES show that the pricing mechanism can effectively improve a VPN's transmission efficiency.