A Network Provisioning Scheme Based on Decentralized Bandwidth Auctions

With the rapidly increasing interest in providing QoS in the Internet, Internet pricing has now been recognized to be a cornerstone of the Internet of the future. Over the last couple of years, this has led to establishing ”Internet Economics” as a new research area of its own, which investigates packet-switched networks from an economical rather than an engineering perspective. In this context, pricing Internet services has always been the central focus of this research, leading to a huge variety of proposed mechanisms (as surveyed e.g. in [11] or [12]). Starting with the seminal ”smart market” approach due to MacKie-Mason [2], the usage of auctions has gained some popularity in this context. Whereas the original smart market proposal dealt with second-price auctions on a packet level, subsequent proposals like the ”Progressive Second-Price” (PSP) mechanism due to Lazar and Semret [13] are able to deal with flows over arbitrary divisible capacities. More recently, some efforts have been directed towards the case of auctions for multi-link paths [14] and/or multi-period sessions [5].