End-to-end reliability-dependent pricing of network services

Abstract

This paper is a first step in the direction of charging telecommunication network access based on the reliability of end-to-end paths. Indeed, in the literature congestion pricing is usually considered as the solution to address the needs of quality-of-service-demanding new applications such as multimedia. Nevertheless, with the widespread diffusion and high capacities of optical fiber, some authors have argued that this pricing scheme will not have to be applied, as capacity will still be ahead of demand. In this paper, we introduce a new direction, noting that even when there is spare capacity, availability can still be a concern. We argue that a charging scheme depending on reliability could be interesting and illustrate how it could be implemented. We also provide a genetic algorithm aiming at extending the network so that the provider's revenue is maximized. We observe the behavior of our method over a specific network topology, and study the robustness of the solution with respect to the problem data.