How to overcome the feasibility problem for tariffing Internet services: the cumulus pricing scheme

The design of tariff schemes for packet-based network services, especially for differentiated Internet services, has turned out to be a non-trivial task. This is mainly due to the issue of how to account for the immense number of individual packets. This paper proposes a paradigm shift and argues that the solution of this feasibility problem is not a matter of coping with complexity, but instead a question of multidimensional mappings of time-scales. The cumulus pricing scheme (CPS) as introduced and investigated here turns out to be a good example for the resulting simple, transparent, market-managed, and feasible Internet tariff schemes