DiffServ node with join minimum cost queue policy: analysis with multiclass traffic

DiffServ is an attractive candidate for providing relative QoS in the Internet. This is also easily amenable to simple and effective pricing mechanisms. By pricing access to a relative QoS, we can model a DiffServ node as a "join minimum cost queue" in which an arriving customer (packet or connection) determines the relative cost as a function of the congestion in the different queues and their access prices and decides to take service from that queue for which the cost is minimum. The Paris Metro pricing system and its work conserving variant called Tirupati pricing are analyzed in the presence of multiclass traffic and for static pricing. Two of the more interesting observations are that the disutility and revenue rate are not monotonic or convex functions of price and the revenue rate is very sensitive to the behavior of the delay sensitive class.