Distributed Dynamic Capacity Contracting: An overlay congestion pricing framework for differentiated-services architecture

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 domain of the differentiated-services (diff-serv) architecture of the Internet. 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. Within the Distributed-DCC framework, we develop two pricing schemes 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. Keywords— Network Pricing, Congestion Pricing, Quality-of-Service, Fairness, Congestion Control, Differentiated-Services