Market based bandwidth allocation policies for QoS control in broadband networks

Efficient quality-of-service (QoS) control in broadband networks requires dynamic bandwidth allocation. This paper formulates a distributed and hierarchical QoS control scheme that dynamically allocates bandwidth based on a market model. The market players are consumers, retailers and wholesalers. Consumers trade bandwidth with retailers, and retailers trade with wholesalers. The market price for bamdwidth fluctuates based on demand and consumers’ price sensitivib (estimated from past transactions). For a given price, consumers opt-tie bandwidth demand Us-mg their individual cost-benefit (ut-tity) functions. In the case of mult-hnedia applications’, a ‘softness” proiile describes the application’s robustness to network congestion. Simulations using hIPEG2 vaiiable bit-rate (VBR) video are used to evaluate the ability of the scheme to effectively provide QoS to applications and, at the same time, provide a framework to price networked multimedia services with heterogeneous traflic and QoS requirements. Key wor& quality-of-seruice, softness profdss, marketlmsed wnhl, MPEG video, broadband service pricing.