Cost and Price Calculation for Internet Integrated Services

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.