A novel, practical pricing strategy for congestion control and differentiated services

Pricing is an effective tool to control congestion and achieve QoS provisioning for multiple differentiated levels of service. In this paper, we propose a practical, flexible and computationally simple pricing strategy that can achieve QoS provisioning in differentiated services networks with multiple priority classes at close to peak efficiency, while also maintaining stable transmission rates from end-users. In contrast to previous work in which dynamic pricing strategies are based on the state of congestion alone, our strategy adds a separate price component for the preferential service received by a packet. In addition, it utilizes a user-centric approach where a user is not charged a higher price unless preferential service is actually delivered.