This work presents a new renegotiated flexibly-priced communication service. The service is based on a novel auction-based flexible pricing scheme, where the flexibility is expressed in terms of client-supplied budget functions that represent the upper bound on the bandwidth unit price the client is willing to pay, as a function of time. This flexibility allows for the admission control and the bandwidth maintenance policies of the scheme to be decentralized. The policies are implemented by the involved switches in a distributed fashion, such that the clients do not need to participate so long as their budget functions remain competitive. We define four measures of flow satisfaction in terms of the quality and the price. We have performed a comprehensive simulation study of the scheme that confirms its positive qualities. One of the main observations is that clients benefit financially when choosing flexible budget functions, when compared to clients that use fixed budget functions and that achieve similar quality of service. Flexible flows achieving 90% throughput satisfaction can save from 7% to 12% in bandwidth unit price, and flows that may be content with lower satisfaction can save up to 46%.
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