GoS-based pricing and resource allocation for multimedia broadband networks

Broadband network are developed to carry a wide range of traffic which has different characteristics and grade-of-service (GoS) requirements. To meet these distinct requirements, we propose to decompose each network component into multiple sub-components. Each sub-component has a dedicated bandwidth and buffer, and it only carries traffic which has a similar GoS requirement. Thus it will reduce the interference from other types of traffic which has totally different GoS requirements. First, we develop a GoS-based pricing scheme which will entail the resources are efficiently utilized. The equilibrium stability is also studied. Then we address the problem of how to optimally allocate available resources among the sub-components. Resource expansion becomes necessary when the network is congested. Two kinds of routing schemes are proposed. One is least cost routing for GoS-insensitive traffic and the other is best GoS routing for GoS-sensitive traffic.