Best-Effort and Guaranteed Performance Services in Telecommunications Networks: Pricing and Call Admission Control Techniques

Abstract

Pricing for the use of telecommunication services has received in the last years a growing attention. The main objective is to establish various fairness criteria in the bandwidth allocation among different traffic classes. In the context of Quality of Service (QoS) networks (e.g. ATM, DiffServ, IntServ) the pricing scheme influences the Call Admission Control (CAC) rules. While, for Best Effort (BE) services, users accept a variable bandwidth allocation and are not subject to CAC and the pricing policies, according to the Proportional Fairnes Pricing, are integrated within the flow control. In this paper we consider both BE traffic and traffic explicitly requiring QoS (Guaranteed Performance, GP) and we propose three Call Admission Control rules for the GP traffic. The aim is to maximize the Internet Service Provider.s overall revenue and to establish a bound over the GP traffic prices. Numerical results are presented to show the good performance of the proposed techniques.