Usage-based pricing law to charge IP network services with performance guarantees

In the present day Internet, the provision of different levels of performance guarantees, appropriate for the type of supported applications and the willingness of users to pay, is a pressing need. Since flat-rate fees are probably inadequate to charge differentiated services, the need to provide usage-based tariff models to charge IP guaranteed services, and therefore to develop business interactions, is expected. We define the network service commodity, traded in a future Internet scenario, as the transfer of information units between two points of the network, and we present an approach to measure it as a function of so called virtual delay. In our approach, the virtual delay summarizes the parameters characterizing the performance guarantees of the transfer service. Under these assumptions, we propose a pricing law to charge improved IP services depending on the duration of the connection and on the traffic volume exchanged during the communication. The tariff is a function of the actually used and/or reserved network resources, so as to satisfy the requirements of users and network management, respectively.