Subject: Cost and Price Calculation for Integrated Services

From: Martin Karsten <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 16:18:27 +0200 (MET DST)

Dear all,
in the following paper, we've written up our ideas on how to combine
economic and technical aspects when applying per-flow charges to
Integrated Services.
We submitted the paper to KiVS'99, a mainly German-speaking conference.
Since we definitely intend to continue work in this area, we solicit
comments from a larger audience, i.e. the readers of this list.
Because of the nature of this work being somewhere in between economy and
computer science, we also gladly welcome any suggestions about appropriate
places to publish work like this.
Thanks in advance,
Martin

BTW, starting Monday I'm out of office until October 1st.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

ftp://ftp.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/pub/papers/calc_iis.ps.gz

Cost and Price Calculation for Internet Integrated Services

Martin Karsten, Jens Schmitt, Lars Wolf, and Ralf Steinmetz

Abstract: Charging schemes are needed to protect an integrated services
network from arbitrary resource reservations and to create a funding
mechanism to extend network capacity at the most desired locations at the
expense of those users that actually use these resources. While not being
the only input into pricing and charging, cost calculation is an important
part of a charging scheme. In this paper, we develop a technique called
virtual resource mapping to apply well-known economic principles to an
optimal pricing framework and other tasks related to charging. Additionally,
we describe how virtual resource parameters can be used to express prices
when being combined with protocol mechanisms for charging. We focus on
rate-based service guarantees in the context of Internet Integrated Services
(IntServ) combined with IP multicast and RSVP as signalling protocol. It
turns out that under given aggregated price-demand patterns, resource costs
can precisely be extracted for each service request. Thereby, virtual
resource parameters can be considered as link between economic theory and
technical reality.