Usage-based pricing law to charge IP network services with performance guarantees
Nicola Bléfari-Melazzi, Dario Di Sorte, Gianluca Reali · 2003
In the present day Internet, the provision of different levels of performance guarantees, appropriate for the type of supported applications and the willingness of users to pay, is a pressing need. Since flat-rate fees are probably inadequate to charge differentiated services, the need to provide usage-based tariff models to charge IP guaranteed services, and therefore to develop business interactions, is expected. We define the network service commodity, traded in a future Internet scenario, as the transfer of information units between two points of the network, and we present an approach to measure it as a function of so called virtual delay. In our approach, the virtual delay summarizes the parameters characterizing the performance guarantees of the transfer service. Under these assumptions, we propose a pricing law to charge improved IP services depending on the duration of the connection and on the traffic volume exchanged during the communication. The tariff is a function of the actually used and/or reserved network resources, so as to satisfy the requirements of users and network management, respectively.