Edge Pricing in Space and Time: Theoretical and Practical Aspects of the Cumulus Pricing Scheme

In the context of the rapidly increasing commercialization of the Internet, the design of suitable pricing models for packet-based networks becomes a necessity for offering approaches for financially-driven sharing of global resources between multiple customers with varying requirements. Addressing such differentiated services both from a customer and a provider point of view has lead to the Cumulus Pricing Scheme (CPS) framework recently established. In this paper, important aspects of CPS are investigated in further detail. Together with a number of simulation results, these investigations demonstrate that CPS is an excellent example for a simple, transparent, market-managed, and feasible Internet pricing scheme that eventually extends the well-known spatial edge pricing paradigm into the time dimension also.