QoS aware adaptive pricing for network services

This paper presents a new methodology based on economic models to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to competing traffic classes (classes of sessions) in packet networks. We consider an economic model of a packet network where resources are priced. As the demand for network services accelerates, users´ satisfaction to the service level might decrease due to congestion at the network nodes. To prevent this, efficient allocation of network resources, such as available bandwidth and switch capacity, is needed. By using so-called user profile as well as utility (e.g. data rate) functions, it is possible to allocate data rates and other utilities using arbitrary number of QoS classes, say 0.01,..., 10. Maximal capacity of the data network infrastructure is exploited by using a dynamic allocation strategy