A Pricing Model for Differentiated Service Billing

Abstract

Wireless communication and Internet protocol (IP) network has evolved over the decade. Today multimedia applications now run on this network such as, voice over IP, streaming audio and video, etc, this has contributed immensely to the congestion on the broadband network. Quality of service (QoS), bandwidth management or IP service control are all general terms given to a broad range of techniques employed to control and shape traffic on this network. Pricing has become an essential tool for costumer care, operator’s revenue and to affect QoS. In this work we present not only a new billing scheme termed Differentiated Service billing (DSB), which controlled congestion by checking user behavior with respect to type of application used on the network, we also introduced a mathematical description of the billing scheme. Our work improves the overall QoS perceived by users of ‘relevant’ applications. The DSB is an improved variant of usage billing. It effectively checks the usage of bandwidth-intensive applications, especially for a campus network. Our results clearly showed an improved network link performance when this billing scheme was compared with the traditional flat billing and usage billing schemes.