A Survey of Network Pricing Schemes

With the Internet experiencing massive growth, new ways to recover ever rising costs and regulate network usage are becoming increasingly important. Several researchers have proposed pricing strategies and econometric models for regulating resource usage in a globally shared network environment. These approaches can take the form of simple \price setting", or can be more closely integrated with the admission control, congestion control, and bandwidth allocation functions of the network. This paper presents a summary of proposed pricing strategies for computer networks, as well as an experimental evaluation of both a static strategy and a dynamic strategy. Simulations of the static strategy show that network utilization decreases as the price per packet increases. Revenue, on the other hand, increases rst and then falls as the price per packet increases. In the dynamic pricing strategy simulations, the price varies over time as a result of user demand for band-width. As the number of users on the network increases , the price per unit of bandwidth increases. Further results and a summary of the pricing schemes that appear in the literature are outlined below.