Price-Sensitive Application Adaptation in Deadline-Based Networks

In deadline-based networks, the delay performance experienced by real-time data transfer largely depends on traffic deadlines and the load level along the data transfer path. To ensure fairness among users and to aid in network load control, a delay pricing and charging scheme was developed for realtime delivery in deadline-based networks; users experiencing different delay performance are charged differently and the charge is higher when the load is heavier. In response to an earlier charge, a price-sensitive adaptive application with limited budget constraints may adjust its traffic accordingly by varying traffic deadline requirements or traffic load intensity. We study the effect of application adaptation in two real-time traffic scenarios: discrete real-time documents, and a mixture of on-line game and multimedia traffic. We show through simulation that the aforementioned pricing and charging scheme easily enables user adaptation, which in turn may significantly improve the network delay performance.