Tariff-based pricing and admission control for DiffServ networks

In a QoS-enabled network environment, there are two major concerns from both user's and provider's points of views: are there enough resources available for a particular traffic flow and what is the price for this flow? These two questions are exactly what admission control and pricing try to answer. An architecture that integrates pricing and admission control seems very promising. In this paper, we propose a tariff-based pricing architecture that integrates pricing and admission control for the DiffServ networks. We also study some pricing setting strategies for our architecture and evaluate our strategies through simulations.