Pricing and Resource Provisioning for Delivering E-content On-Demand with Multiple Levels-of-Service

Businesses selling multimedia rich software or e-content are growing in the Internet. The e-content can be downloaded by the customer or alternately, streamed by the content provider, immediately after on-line transactions. Since Internet connection speeds are variable, ranging from dial-up access speeds to broadband speeds, the content providers may provide different levels-of-service (LoS) for the same content. If a provider offers service at different LoS, for example at 56 kbps, and 128 kbps, how should the price of the service be set such that the provider makes the most money? In addition, how should the resources be provisioned among the different service levels? In this paper, we address such pricing and resource provisioning issues for delivering e-content at multiple service levels.