Auction based bandwidth allocation on the Internet

QoS provisioning on the Internet entails resource allocation as per the service level agreements (SLAs) with the customer. Since, the duration of the time slots over which the resources are allocated is short, resources are allocated and de-allocated frequently. In this paper, an auction based mechanism has been proposed and evaluated for nearly consistent reservation of bandwidth together with revenue maximization for the service provider. In the usual auction mechanism, bidding is performed on the assumption that the reserve price is fixed and is known to the customers a priori. This assumption leads to an inefficient market and the revenue of the seller suffers. In the proposed auction model, a varying reserve price is proposed and incorporated in the progressive second price (PSP) model. The variation in the reserve price acts as a signal to the users to modify their bids accordingly. The results suggest that this mechanism helps raise the potential revenue of the seller irrespective of the price mechanism being adopted