A Spot Pricing Framework For Pricing Intra-Domain Assured Bandwidth Services

The Internet today offers primarily a best-effort service. Research and development efforts are currently underway to allow the provision of better than best-effort quality of service assurances. In this article we develop a spot-pricing framework for bandwidth assured Internet service contracts. A nonlinear pricing model forms the basis for the framework. The price process is obtained for different demand profiles of the customer-base and demand arrival characteristics. Simulation modeling and analysis tools are employed to implement the pricing framework and analyze the price process. The framework when implemented at access or exchange points of different service provider domains will provide assured bandwidth for inter-domain traffic.