Operators of multi-service networks require simple charging schemes with which they can fairly recover costs from their users and effectively allocate network resources. This paper studies an approach for computing such charges from simple measurements (time and volume), and relating these to bounds of the effective bandwidth. To achieve economic efficiency, it is necessary that usage-based charging schemes capture the relative amount of resources used by connections. Based on this criteria, we evaluate our approach for real traffic consisting of Internet Wide Area Network traces and MPEG-1 compressed video. Its incentive compatibility is shown with an example involving deterministic multiplexing, and the effect of pricing on a network's equilibrium is investigated for deterministic and statistical multiplexing. Finally, we investigate the incentives for traffic shaping provided by the approach.
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