Network path pricing: a QoS-based model

A critical question facing network designers is how real-time applications can fairly share communication resources while simultaneously obtaining sufficient quality-of-service (QoS) levels from the network. This paper presents an end-to-end solution to this problem that combines an economic pricing model for resource sharing with a QoS network model. We describe a measurement-based approach for QoS path pricing that results in near-optimal resource allocation policies between QoS and best-effort traffic. We also present the results of a large-scale simulation study that shows how this pricing scheme increases both end-user value and system throughput with minimal computational overhead.