Congestion pricing overlaid on edge-to-edge congestion control

One of the biggest obstacles for implementing congestion pricing is the pricing time-scale. The Internet traffic is highly variant and hard to control without a mechanism that operates on very low time-scales, i.e. on the order of round-trip-times (RTTs). However, pricing naturally operates on very large time-scales because of human involvement. So, in order to put tight control on congestion through pricing, new implementation methods and architectures are needed for congestion pricing. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel approach Pricing over Congestion Control (POCC). The essence of POCC is to overlay congestion pricing on top of an underlying congestion control scheme which enforces a much tighter control than pricing. This way congestion in the interior network is controlled very tightly, while pricing is done at time-scales large enough to incorporate human involvement. We investigate the problems raised within such an overlay architecture and provide solutions to them. We particularly focus on diff-serv and use edge-to-edge congestion control and edge-toedge pricing techniques to illustrate POCC ideas in simulation.