Improving QoS of the Internet during congestion through auction

There have been numerous suggestions for improving the quality of service (QoS) of the Internet amid network congestion. However, due to the nature of the Internet service - best-effort delivery and distributed - it has been difficult to achieve. One dominant idea of solving the congestion problem is to have varying price for Internet access. The concept of smart market, proposed by MacKie-Mason et al. (1994), can help build an efficient Internet pricing structure that can be used to provide QoS when the network is congested. Efficient pricing structure can improve QoS of the Internet service by discouraging unnecessary usage of the Internet while giving access to the user who has "need-to-use" of the Internet through the pricing mechanism. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model for the pricing structure that utilizes auction market model as an implementation of the smart market. As a proof of concept, we have implemented a network sorting algorithm in CLIPS that implements auction part of the model.