An approach to pricing and resource sharing for available bit rate (ABR) services

We present an approach to pricing and resource sharing for ABR services which allows bursty users to express their true preferences for network usage. Users bid for some amount of effective bandwidth, and the network controls the effective bandwidth of their traffic by adjusting the explicit rate (maximum rate the user can send traffic) in order to achieve economically fair resource sharing. Experiments demonstrate how our approach can differentiate connections with different mean rates, and show that it leads to adequate bandwidth utilization for anticipated link capacities and traffic burstiness.