An Analysis of a Unified Pricing Model for Multiservice Networks

Abstract

There has been recent interest in employing unified pricing schemes for supporting both quality-of-service (QoS) and best-effort traffic within multiservice networks. This article presents an analytical approach for the design and analysis of this class of network pricing control. In particular, the authors propose an approximation method to estimate overall user value arising from all traffic types, given the routes for QoS traffic. Their approach considers admission control as both a resource allocation issue and a pricing control decision for QoS traffic in a combined QoS and best-effort environment. The authors show how to convert the price-based admission control decision to a resource-based blocking problem. The experimental results showed that the proposed analytical model is quite accurate as compared to simulation results. The authors also present the numerical results of performance analysis for multiservice networks using their proposed approximation method. Their approach can be used to predict the performance and parameter settings for a wide range of combined QoS and best-effort pricing schemes.