A Survey: Pricing for Internet Resource Allocation and Congestion Control

The economic analysis of the Internet has been paid more and more attentions for optimizing the Internet resource utilization and controlling network congestion. A respectable number of attempts have been made to improve our understanding of the Internet as an economic system. We will then be able to provide adequate quality of service (QoS) to Internet users. By choosing an appropriate pricing policy, the efficiency of resource utilization and the social welfare are able to be maximized and the overuse of the Internet resources can be effectively controlled. This paper surveys the pricing concepts for Internet and various engineering researches of resource allocation and congestion control using microeconomics theory. We summarize the optimization techniques and basic solutions for the optimization problems, as well as a number of different pricing schemes.