Time-of-Day Internet Access Management: Virtual Pricing Vs. Quota Scheduling

There exists abusive and unfair Internet access during peak hours over a free-of-charge or flat-rate network even under a quota-based priority control (QPC). To design effective management over time based on QPC, this paper compares and analyzes two classes of schemes: quota scheduling (QS) and time-of-day pricing (TDP). The TDP design captures both myopic and prudent user behaviors by exploiting empirical demand data. The load balancing-based quota scheduling (LB-QS) intends to equalize traffic over time by proportional quota allocation to time periods of control, while the peak shaving-based quota scheduling (PS-QS) is designed to reduce total traffic during peak hours through a rough empirical data-based user model. Performance evaluation demonstrates that TDP significantly outperforms both LB-QS and PS-QS. This is because TDP exploits user demand modeling and pricing to induce user behavior over time. The TDP design is more complicated than QS. Recommendations are given for selecting an effective Internet access scheme based on data availability