A study of simple usage-based charging schemes for broadband networks

Operators of multi-service networks require simple charging schemes with wh ich they can fairly recover costs from their users and effectively allocate network resources. This paper studies an approach for computing such charg es from simple measurements (time and volume), and relating these to bounds of the effective bandwidth. To achieve economic efficiency, it is necessar y that usage-based charging schemes capture the relative amount of resource s used by connections. Based on this criteria, we evaluate our approach for real traffic consisting of Internet Wide Area Network traces and MPEG-1 co mpressed video. Its incentive compatibility is shown with an example involv ing deterministic multiplexing, and the effect of pricing on a network's eq uilibrium is investigated for deterministic and statistical multiplexing. F inally, we investigate the incentives for traffic shaping provided by the a pproach.