Cost Model and Optimal Allocation of Service Curves in Reservation-based Networks

摘要

Although sophisticated network transport services providing multi-parameter performance guarantees have been defined, the most commonly deployed cost models are still based on bandwidth as single commodity to be charged. As alternative to a multi-parameter service description, service curves are an appropriate tool to characterize the service performance and to quantify the efforts required to provide this performance. In our work we deal with an appropriate cost model for generic service curves. We identify the service curve properties, which significantly impact on the performance perceived by users, i.e. which have major impact on the user's utility. These characteristic service curve properties constitute the resource set that is the basis of an appropriate cost model. The proposed cost model is based on charging the allocation of the identified resources and we derive a minimum cost allocation strategy depending on the single unit prices of each resource. Using the marginal rate of substitution among the identified resources, the derived allocation strategy only requires knowledge of the technical efficiency constraint defining an implicit relation between the respective resources.