A pricing policy for scalable VOD applications

Many video applications are scalable due to human tolerance to the degradation in picture quality, frame loss and end-to-end delay. Scalability allows the network to utilize its resources efficiently for supporting additional connections, thereby increasing revenue and number of supported customers. This can be accomplished by a dynamic admission control scheme which scales down existing connections to support new requests. However, users will not be willing to tolerate quality degradation unless it is coupled with monetary or availability incentives. We propose a pricing policy and a corresponding admission control scheme for scalable VOD applications. The pricing policy is two-tiered, based on a connection setup component and a scalable component. Connections which are more scalable are charged less but are more liable to be degraded. The proposed policy trades off performance degradation with monetary incentives to improve user benefit and network revenue, and to decrease the blocking probability of connection requests. We demonstrate by means of simulation that this policy encourages users to specify the scalability of an application to the network.