People: Prof. Ravichandran (Mgmt School-RPI), Ranjeeta Sinha, Murat Yuksel.
Sponsor: NSF Interdisciplinary Award: ANI-9819112

The internet is not a free resource and hence the users need to be pay for usage. However, internet pricing bears little relation to conventional telecom pricing [1]. Several user-provider relationships exist in the Internet and models of interaction and contracting between the users and providers are sought by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Each of these user classes will presumably be priced differently.

The differentiated services group in the IETF is currently debating providing mechanisms within the Internet to allow different users to get different levels of contracted service which implies a framework for implementation of different pricing schemes.

Our research aims to develop user-provider models, pricing schemes, and work with the IETF on defining mechanisms necessary to support a large subset of these schemes. We will also look at pricing schemes from the view of traffic management to determine its impact on traffic dynamics. Our current focus is on linking edge-to-edge congestion monitoring schemes, dynamic capacity contracting schemes and congestion sensitive pricing schemes into a single framework. As a result, this project is closely linked to my other project on traffic management .

RPI Papers
Related work in Internet Pricing