Distributed dynamic capacity contracting: an overlay congestion pricing framework

Several congestion pricing proposals have been made in the last decade. Usually, however, those proposals studied optimal strategies and did not focus on implementation issues. Our main contribution in this paper is to address implementation issues for congestion-sensitive pricing over a single differentiated-services (diff-serv) domain. We propose a new congestion-sensitive pricing framework Distributed Dynamic Capacity Contracting (Distributed-DCC), which is able to provide a range of fairness (e.g. max–min, proportional) in rate allocation by using pricing as a tool. We develop a pricing scheme within the Distributed-DCC framework and investigate several issues such as optimality of prices, fairness of rate allocation. We also introduce two pricing architectures based on the manner of using pricing to control congestion: Pricing for Congestion Control (PFCC) and Pricing over Congestion Control (POCC). PFCC uses pricing directly for controlling congestion, whilst POCC uses an underlying edge-to-edge congestion control mechanism by overlaying pricing on top of it. We, then, adapt Distributed-DCC framework to these architectures, and evaluate the two architectures by extensive simulation. q 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.