A Unified Model for a Pricing Scheme in a Heterogeneous Environment of QoS-Controlled and Best Effort Connections

Starting from the mid ‘90s, a growing attention has been devoted to more and more sophisticated pricing models for telecommunication services and, in particular, it has become necessary to develop and test pricing methodologies to improve utility and fairness. A number of pricing models have been proposed and analyzed in the context of Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed networks (e.g., ATM), and more recently also for best effort (BE) environments. Concerning QoS networks, the optimization often influences the Call Admission Control (CAC). In a BE network, where users do not declare QoS parameters and there is no CAC, the pricing policies should be integrated within the flow control and they are different from those adopted in the QoS environments. In this paper we investigate the condition where both Best Effort (BE) traffic and traffic explicitly requiring QoS (Guaranteed Performance, GP) are present. We propose a mechanism that influences both GP CAC and BE flow control and it is aimed at maximizing the overall revenue for all traffic classes and to achieve global fairness of the prices. Preliminary numerical results are presented to show the good performance of the proposed technique.

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