Congestion Pricing and User Adaptation

The problem of sharing bandwidth in a communication network has been the focus of much recent research aimed at guaranteeing an appropriate quality of service to users. This is particularly challenging in an environment with a great diversity of users and applications, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to tightly constrain user attributes and requirements. This motivates shifting the burden of rate allocation from the network to the end-systems. We propose a decentralized scheme for user adaptation and study its dynamics. The proposed scheme uses congestion prices as a mechanism for providing both feedback and incentives to end-systems. Keywords—Pricing, quality of service, congestion control, Internet