Adaptive and Flexible Cumulus Pricing for Internet Services: A Tariff Framework Combining Technical Feasibility and Economic Viability

Within the heavy debate on Quality-of-Service (QoS) management in the future Internet, charging for QoS-enabled services has adopted a crucial place, since business relations are the driving force for commercial service offerings. Economic management principles are applied in a number of traditional markets, but only recently have gained increasing interest in the control of Internet services and traffic with respect to economic efficiency, user acceptability, and technical feasibility. The present paper addresses these three main areas of current research in a wholistic approach. Based on a generic time-scale model for Internet tariffs and three well-defined axioms of feasible Internet charging, the Cumulus Pricing Scheme (CPS) serves as a framework for pricing Internet services. CPS allows a well-balanced compromise of economic viability and technical feasibility, while relying on crucial user and provider points of view on acceptability and transparency of the pricing scheme. This so-called “NUT Trilemma” is investigated with respect to a set of detailed aspects and their interdependencies, which are measured, simulated, and evaluated in a quantifiable manner. Service level specifications are investigated, while results obtained show that CPS achieves the central role of an economic and scalable management tool for Internet traffic.