On the Feasibility of Dynamic Congestion-Based Pricing in Differentiated Services Networks

Differentiated services can ensure that traffic on some codepoints receives higher quality of service (QoS) than traffic on other codepoints, but without additional mechanisms it cannot target any particular QoS. Congestion-based pricing has been suggested as a method to target QoS in other network architectures. Here, we investigate whether congestion-based pricing can be used to control aggregate traffic into each codepoint by motivating users to choose the codepoints appropriate for each application. We first ask what information needs to be exchanged; we assert that both price and QoS information must be available for users to make decisions. We then ask how effective congestion-based pricing in diffServ can be; we find that it is feasible only for networks with sufficiently high bandwidth to guarantee that QoS can be quickly measured.