An integrated resource negotiation, pricing, and QoS adaptation framework for multimedia applications

We study a dynamic, usage- and congestion-dependent pricing system in conjunction with price-sensitive user adaptation of network usage. We first present a resource negotiation and pricing (RNAP) protocol and architecture to enable users to select and dynamically renegotiate network services. We develop mechanisms within the RNAP architecture for the network to dynamically formulate prices and communicate pricing and charging information to the users. We then outline a general pricing strategy in this context. We discuss candidate algorithms by which applications (singly, or as part of a multi-application system) can adapt their rate and QoS requests, based on the user-perceived value of a given combination of transmission parameters. Finally, we present experimental results to show that usage- and congestion-dependent pricing can effectively reduce the blocking probability, and allow bandwidth to be shared fairly among applications, depending on the elasticity of their respective bandwidth requirements.