Adaptive QoS provisioning by pricing incentive QoS routing for next generation networks

In this paper, we present an integrated solution for enabling the next generation Internet to achieve the differentiated service and availability guarantee. In particular, we utilize a recent proposed service architecture, referred to as Service Vector (SV), to enhance the QoS granularity and flexibility offered in the Diffserv network model and improve both the network resource utilization and user benefits. In order to efficiently and effectively use network resources, we investigate the issue of integrating pricing into QoS routing and propose a PRicing InCEntive QoS Routing (PRICER) mechanism. PRICER consists of two components: a novel routing-oriented state update (ROSE) scheme and an efficient Pricing Incentive Routing Algorithm (PIRA). ROSE performs the task of exchanging link state information throughout the network, and PIRA is a routing algorithm used to find paths meeting the QoS requirements of applications. By theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we show that ROSE greatly outperforms the state of the arts in terms of both protocol overhead and the accuracy of link state information, and PIRA can guarantee finding the QoS constrained path with fairly low average computational complexity. The most distinguished property of PIRA is its progressive property, which is very useful in practice: it can self-adaptively minimize its computational complexity without sacrificing its performance. Another contribution of this paper is the introduction of a method to numerically evaluate the staleness of link state information.