Resource Pricing for Differentiated Services

In paper we present an overview of recent work on resource pricing for differentiated services in the Internet. This approach is based upon encouraging cooperation between the end-systems and the network by use of the correct feedback signals. These signals reflect the congestion shadow prices at a resource, and their use means then even ‘selfish’ end-systems, acting in their own best interests, will push the system to a global or social optimum. In contrast to most current Diffserv proposals, little is required from resources in the network; they just have to mark packets correctly, while the end-system can use complex or simple strategies. All that is needed is for the end-systems to have an incentive to react to the feedback signals, and then we have a distributed resource sharing mechanism. We give examples of typical end-system behaviour, and show how this approach can also implement Distributed Admission Control, where the decision is in the hand of the end-system. We comment on how ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) could be used as an enabling technology. Lastly we outline how guarantees can be constructed with this framework.