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A Novel Approach to Charge for IP Services with QoS Support

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If the Internet is to become a network supporting differentiated application and transfer services, advanced architectures must be deployed to efficiently support hard Quality of Service (QoS) and usage-based charging. In this paper we present a novel pricing scheme for IP services with guaranteed quality. Our approach is built on the basis of the virtual delay, which is a novel, simple and effective QoS index that describes an advanced IP service. We propose a model to compute the virtual delay from a purely technical point of view, taking into account not only guaranteed performance, but also traffic and system parameters. We then analyze the sensitivity of both the virtual delay and the tariff towards the involved parameters, taking into account both the users’ benefit and the operators’ income. We also extend the pricing model to make it dependent on service demand. Finally, we also present an economic analysis, the aim of which is to establish a model to set the QoS level and the relevant price, taking into account revenue, social fairness, and service availability.

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Notes

  1. We are aware that a traffic flow may pass through a number of different domains and a model to build the end-to-end tariff is needed. A number of models have been presented in literature: the edge pricing model [19], RNAP protocol [20], and brokering-based procedures [16, 17, 21]. Also, issues relevant to QoS-and-price based inter-domain routing are very challenging [17, 21, 22]. In this regard, the virtual delay could also be the basis of minimum price inter-domain routing algorithms [17, 21], and it should be a standard (and not proprietary) measure of the QoS level of a service transmission, since the perspective is moved from a local intra-domain to an inter-domain scope. However, these aspects are beyond the scope of this work, in which we propose and analyze a model to compute the virtual delay commencing with per domain technical issues.

  2. Congestion pricing is commonly adopted in literature to charge for elastic applications (e.g., see [40, 41]), and it is a very effective tool to control network congestion [42]. In response to price variations, users adapt their sending rates with the aim of maximizing their utility, so that a efficient, fair sharing of network resources is reached. In addition, congestion pricing can be applied on both a per-packet and per-call basis, and therefore the tariff applied to deliver a packet or to support a call may be strongly dynamic, even throughout the call itself. Thus, users have to be continuously informed about the price charged by the network according to the degree of congestion encountered by the packets along the path, in order to be able to react to price changes and to possibly renegotiate the QoS level and the tariff. A simpler application of congestion pricing is the well-known time of day pricing. Studies of its effectiveness can be found in [43, 44].

  3. In accordance with [2], we consider tariffs to be socially fair if access to the network is not determined by users’ wealth.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors sincerely thank the anonymous referees for their constructive suggestions and comments that have largely contributed to the improvement of the quality of this paper. This work has been co-funded by the European Union in the framework of the IST project SIMPLICITY and by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research (MIUR) within the FIRB project PRIMO.

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Correspondence to Mauro Femminella.

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Dario Di Sorte is a Post-Doc researcher with the Networking Group at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica e dell’Informazione (DIEI) of the University of Perugia, Italy. He received the Ph.D. in “Telematics and Information Society” from the University of Florence in June 2003, and the “Laurea” degree in Electronic Engineering magna cum laude from the University of Perugia in January 2000. His research interests focus on IP networks, especially on Quality of Service, pricing, and mobility management.

Mauro Femminella is a Post-Doc researcher with the Department of Information and Electronic Engineering of the University of Perugia, Italy. He received the “Laurea” and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering on 1999 and 2003, respectively, both from the University of Perugia. His research interests focus on satellite networks, content delivery networks, wireless LANs, and IP networks, particularly on quality of service, pricing and mobility management.

Gianluca Reali is an Associate Professor of the Department of Information and Electronic Engineering of the University of Perugia since January 2005. He received the Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications from the University of Perugia in 1997 working on Spread Spectrum techniques. He was a researcher at the University of Perugia from 1997 to 2004. He has worked in IP networks, particularly in transport and resource management protocols. He was involved in many European ACTS and IST projects and FIRB and PRIN projects co-funded by the Italian government.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

In this Appendix, our goal is to provide readers with more details about the model used in this paper to compute the values of effective bandwidth and buffer when a small amount of packet losses may be tolerated within a network node with capacity C and buffer B (B/C=D jitter).

We undertake to calculate the effective bandwidth and buffer pair (c p 0,b p 0) by using the approach illustrated in [31], in particular with the small buffer approximation ([31], Section III). In more detail, having defined

$$\alpha (c_{p0} ) = \frac{{c_{p0} }}{{P_{S0} }}\log \left( {\frac{{c_{p0} }}{{r_{S0} }}} \right) + \left( {1 - \frac{{c_{p0} }}{{P_{S0} }}} \right)\log \left( {\frac{{P_{S0} - c_{p0} }}{{P_{S0} - r_{S0} }}} \right),$$
(29)
$$\beta (c_{p0} ) = \frac{2}{{P_{S0} }}\sqrt {\log \left( {\frac{{c_{p0} (P_{S0} - r_{S0} )}}{{r_{S0} (P_{S0} - c_{p0} )}}} \right)\left( {\frac{{c_{p0} P_{S0} + P_{S0} r_{S0} - 2r_{S0} c_{p0} )}}{{B_{{\rm T}S0} }}} \right) \!+\! \left( {\frac{{P_{S0} (c_{p0} - r_{S0} )}}{{B_{TS0} }}} \right)},$$
(30)

following the result of [48 ], the Authors show that the effective bandwidth is the solution of the equation:

$$\alpha (c_{p0} )C/c_{p0} + \beta (c_{p0} )\sqrt {BC/c_{p0} } = - \log (P_{{\rm loss}} )$$
(31)

Thus, c p 0=c p 0(P loss) and b p 0(P loss)=D jitter · c p 0(P loss). The maximum number of flows N that can be allocated in the node (B, C) while guaranteeing the performance (D jitter, P loss) is equal to N=C/c p 0=B/b p 0.

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Di Sorte, D., Femminella, M. & Reali, G. A Novel Approach to Charge for IP Services with QoS Support. J Netw Syst Manage 14, 279–312 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-006-9030-0

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