Congestion-aware internet pricing for media streaming

Media webcasting and conferencing that involve many geographically distributed participants contribute significantly to congestion in the Internet. The current usage-based data pricing model does not take into account the hidden cost imposed by media streaming in the Internet core, including the network cost of replicating and relaying traffic in video multicast, and could potentially exacerbate congestion. In lieu of the recently emerged content sponsoring, in this paper, we present a simple congestion pricing model for ISPs (e.g. Comcast) to charge media streaming operators (e.g. Netflix) based on the bandwidth-delay product on each overlay link (either server-to-server or server-to-user) that the media streaming operator has chosen to use. The proposed pricing policy incentivizes different media streaming applications to collectively reduce their “waiting packets” in the Internet, alleviating congestion. We formulate the min-cost single and multiple multicast problems for the applications to construct their streaming overlays, based on a dense pool of CDN nodes. An efficient EM algorithm is given to solve the proposed geometric optimization problem and is evaluated through simulations.