Time-of-day Internet-access management by combining empirical data-based pricing with quota-based priority control

An empirical data-based design methodology is proposed for Internet-access management to improve congestion, uneven usage and fairness, especially during peak hours, over a free-of-charge or flat-rate network. The design methodology combines time-of-day pricing (TDP) with quota-based priority control (QPC). Core to the design methodology are the innovations in characterising user demand and quota-allocation behaviour with respect to time and pricing. In-depth analyses of empirical data reveal distinctive behaviour patterns of myopic and prudent quota allocations over time and both patterns indicate high preference for peak-hour access. The user models adopt general utility functions and capture how pricing affects user behaviour as prudent or myopic. Preference parameters of users' utility over time are then estimated by collecting easily measurable user volumes. The TDP design problem is formulated and solved as a Stackelberg game. Tested on the empirical data of a 5000-user network, the TDP design leads to significant improvements in peak-hour usage and fairness, peak shaving and load balancing over pure QPC. The methodology requires only two simple and short-period data collections from an operational network and takes about 1 min of CPU time for TDP calculation. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our design methodology when applied to Internet-access environments with frequent changes.