Pricing granularity for congestion-sensitive pricing

One of the key issues for implementing congestion pricing is the pricing granularity (i.e. pricing interval or 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 times-scales because of human involvement. Moreover, structure of wide-area networks does not allow frequent price updates for many reasons, such as RTTs are very large for some cases. In this paper, we investigate the issue of pricing granularity, identify problems, and propose solutions.