A PRICING MECHANISM FOR SCALABLE VIDEO DELIVERY

Many video applications tolerate continuous media (CM) scaling. Scalin g is acceptable due to human tolerance to degradation in picture quali ty, frame loss, and end-to-end delay. CM scaling enables the network t o utilize its resources efficiently for supporting additional customer s and to increase its revenue. However, due to quality degradation, us ers will not be willing to tolerate scaling unless it is coupled with monetary or availability incentives. We propose a pricing policy and a corresponding admission control scheme for scalable video application s. The pricing policy is two-tiered, based on a connection set-up comp onent and a scalable component. Connections that are more scalable are charged less, but are more Liable to be degraded. The proposed policy trades off performance degradation with monetary incentives to improv e user benefit and network revenue and to decrease the blocking probab ility of connection requests. We demonstrate by means of simulation th at this policy encourages users to specify the scalability of an appli cation to the network.