A Packet Marking Algorithm for Congestion Pricing

In the resource pricing concept, developed by Kelly et al. [1], the network marks packets with appropriate price signals to direct the users’ actions. The theoretically correct congestion dependent prices, however, are not all known at the time when the marking occurs at a network resource. In this paper, we propose a packet marking algorithm which maximally utilises the information available at the time of marking. The known prices are marked directly on the packets, while the unknown ones are replaced by their expected values. Calculation of the expected values depends on a suitable system model. We derive these prices for a simple M/M/1/K resource model and generalise the result for GI/GI/1/K models using an approximate diffusion approach.