An incentive charging scheme for differentiated services

Recently, many research efforts have been focused on providing differentiated services in the Internet. However, less attention has been focused on the service charging problem. In this paper, we propose an incentive charging scheme to optimize the coexistence of EF service and AF service in the network based on the DiffServ framework. This scheme imposes a lower service charge on AF service in order to attract customers to choose this service. Because of the concept of multiplexing gain, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) can get more revenue by serving more concurrent customers via AF service. On the other hand, customers can choose their preferred service based on their true needs. We use Markov Process with reward to derive the optimal tariff policy under different levels of network utilization. Moreover, the results also provide some interesting insights for the design of optimal charging schemes.