A proposal of new price-based Call Admission Control rules for Guaranteed Performance services multiplexed with Best Effort traffic

Pricing for the use of telecommunication services is an issue widely treated in the literature. In the last years it has received a growing attention in order to establish various fairness criteria in the bandwidth allocation for each type of traffic class. A number of pricing models have been proposed and analyzed in the context of Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed networks (e.g. ATM, IP Integrated Services, IP Differentiated Services) and more recently, also for Best Effort (BE) environments. In the context of QoS networks the pricing scheme can influence the Call Admission Control (CAC) rules. On the contrary, for a BE service, users accept a variable bandwidth allocation, they are not subject to CAC and their pricing policies, according to the Proportional Fairness Pricing, are integrated within the flow control. In this paper we investigate the condition where both BE traffic and traffic explicitly requiring QoS (Guaranteed Performance, GP) are present. We propose three CAC rules for the GP traffic. The aim is to maximize the Internet Service Provider’s overall revenue and to establish a bound over the GP traffic prices. Numerical results are presented to show the good performance of the proposed techniques. q 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.