Time-of-day Internet-access management by combining empirical data-based pricing with quota-based priority control

An empirical data-based design methodology is proposed for Internet-access management to improve congestion, uneven usage and fairness, especially during peak hours, over a free-of-charge or flat-rate network. The design methodology combines time-of-day pricing (TDP) with quota-based priority control (QPC). Core to the design methodology are the innovations in characterising user demand and quota-allocation behaviour with respect to time and pricing. In-depth analyses of empirical data reveal distinctive behaviour patterns of myopic and prudent quota allocations over time and both patterns indicate high preference for peak-hour access. The user models adopt general utility functions and capture how pricing affects user behaviour as prudent or myopic. Preference parameters of users´ utility over time are then estimated by collecting easily measurable user volumes. The TDP design problem is formulated and solved as a Stackelberg game. Tested on the empirical data of a 5000-user network, the TDP design leads to significant improvements in peak-hour usage and fairness, peak shaving and load balancing over pure QPC. The methodology requires only two simple and short-period data collections from an operational network and takes about 1 min of CPU time for TDP calculation. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our design methodology when applied to Internet-access environments with frequent changes.