A simulation framework for evaluating Internet pricing mechanisms

For several years, researchers in the Internet pricing research area have been proposing various pricing mechanisms. To analyze and evaluate their proposals, they usually make use of analytical based approaches with different assumptions on the environment (sometimes simplistic assumptions); this makes it difficult, or rather impossible, to compare proposals using the same realistic assumptions on the environment. Sometimes, they use also simulations to evaluate their proposals; however, these simulations are very specific and cannot be used for other proposals. We believe that there is a need for a simulation framework that can be used to evaluate different pricing schemes. Such a framework will en able the evaluation of Internet pricing schemes using the same realistic environment (e.g., network and traffic). In this paper, we present the. design and implementation of an Internet pricing simulator using J-Sim, a java-based network simulation tool. The objective of the framework is to ease the process of evaluating Internet pricing schemes. For a proof of concept, we evaluate a pricing scheme, we developed in the past, using the proposed framework.