Comparing usage-based pricing schemes for broadband networks

Tariff structures where charges depend on resource usage allow network operators to fairly recover costs from their customers. The notion of effective bandwidth is an important mathematical abstraction to the complex problem of quantifying resource usage. We consider usage-based pricing schemes which are based on some bound of the effective bandwidth and involve two measurements: the duration of a connection and the total volume transferred. The schemes are compared according to their fairness, i.e., their ability to capture the relative amount of resources used by connections. Our experiments involve a large set of MPEG-1 compressed video with different contents, and show that for links with a high degree of multiplexing, simple approximations can yield good performance