Information exchange in DiffServ pricing

Differentiated services can ensure that traffic on some codepoints receives higher quality of service (QoS) than traffic on other codepoints, but without additional mechanisms it cannot target any particular QoS. Congestion-based pricing has been suggested as a method to target QoS in other network architectures. Here, we investigate whether congestion-based pricing can be used to control aggregate traffic into each codepoint by motivating users to choose the codepoints appropriate for each application. We focus on what information needs to be exchanged in a distributed fashion and assert that both price and QoS information must be available for users to make decisions.