Auctioning of Link Capacity

The rapid growth of the Internet brings us two facts: increased requirements on large bandwidth and adequate supply of network resources by competitive network providers. New pricing mechanism is needed to satisfy both network users and providers by providing a fair and rational network usage mechanism. Auction is one of important ways for setting price according to demand and supply. How to introduce the auction into the network resource (e.g. link capacity) allocation is an interesting topic worth studying. In this paper, we study the issues on the auction of link capacity. Based on the preliminary study, we propose a research topic regarding a self-regulating auction for intelligent bandwidth allocation routing for further discussion. We think the auction is one of potential approaches for fair and rational pricing over the networks. But it is necessary to introduce new mechanisms in order to apply it in the new network paradigm.