Understanding Internet pricing: an objective-oriented classification

In recent years, pricing has been taken into account as an effective mechanism for congestion control management and resource allocation in the Internet. While there are many diverse factors such as technology, economics, regulations, and market forces involved in the analysis of a pricing scheme, having an objective-oriented classification of charging schemes would be very useful to engineers and researchers working in this field. Our work is based on a broad survey of currently available Internet pricing schemes. We provide a set of clear and structured parameters to examine the inner characteristics of each charging scheme. An integrated and expressive evaluation system is introduced to show the diverse objectives of each scheme. We apply our parameters and evaluation system to classify prevalent charging schemes into structured groups.