Pricing Law to Charge IP Guaranteed Services

This paper presents a usage-based tariff model to charge IP guaranteed network services. We consider a future business scenario where the Internet can support application services that need performance guarantees. In this scenario we define the concept of network commodity, that is the transfer of information units between two points of the network. This commodity is associated with a measure and a price, which depend on the value of the so called virtual delay, which summarizes the QoS parameters of the transfer service. Starting from these concepts, we propose a tariff model that depends on both the reserved resources and the actual use of the service. The model is such that it is possible to adjust the weights of the two components arbitrarily. The background of this work is the IST project WHYLESS.COM, sponsored by the European Union.