Traffic regulation with single- and dual-homed ISPs under a percentile-based pricing policy

We investigate how a customer (an enterprise or a large organization), when facing a percentile-based pricing policy, can optimally balance the Internet access cost and the traffic buffering delay penalty by traffic regulation. The problem is referred to as the Optimal Traffic Regulation (OTR) problem. Solutions to various cases of the OTR problem are provided. For a customer with a single-homed ISP, we present optimal solutions to the OTR problem based on dynamic programming for the offline case with a known traffic demand pattern. A real-time traffic scheduling algorithm is proposed to deal with the online case where the traffic demands are different from a given demand pattern. We further extend the dynamic programming model to the case of dual-homed ISPs. Experimental results on the data from an Internet trace confirm the effectiveness of our solutions.