Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Exploring Traffic Pricing for the Virtual Private Network

  • Published:
Information Technology and Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper explores the implementation issues of network traffic pricing in Internet-based virtual Private Networks (VPNs). A simplified VPN traffic-pricing formula is derived for optimizing VPN bandwidth service welfare. We provide price formulae for both prioritized first-in-first-out bandwidth scheduling and non-prioritized round-robin bandwidth scheduling. A transaction-level pricing architecture based on proxy server technology is proposed, and a prototype traffic-pricing system, VPN Traffic-Pricing Experiment System (VTPES), has been developed to test the transaction-level pricing architecture and examine the pricing formula. Experiments conducted with VTPES show that the pricing mechanism can effectively improve a VPN's transmission efficiency.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. M. Allman, V. Paxson and W. Stevens, TCP Congestion Control, Internet RFC2581 (1999), http:// www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/rfc/rfc2581.txt.

  2. B. Braden et al., Recommendations on queue management and congestion avoidance in the Internet, Internet RFC2309 (1998), http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/rfc/rfc2309.txt.

  3. D.D. Clark, Adding service discrimination to the Internet, Telecommunication Policy 20 (1996) 169-181.

    Google Scholar 

  4. A. Demers, S. Keshav and S. Shenker, Analysis and simulation of a fair queuing algorithm, Internetworking: Research and Experience 1 (1990) 3-26.

    Google Scholar 

  5. S. Floyd, TCP and explicit congestion notification, ACM Computer Communications Review 24 (1994) 10-23.

    Google Scholar 

  6. S. Floyd and K. Fall, Promoting the use of end-to-end congestion control in the Internet, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 7(4) (1999) 458-472.

    Google Scholar 

  7. S. Floyd and V. Jacobson, Random Early Detection (RED) gateways for congestion avoidance, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 1(4) (1993) 397-413.

    Google Scholar 

  8. A. Gupta et al., Streaming the digital economy: How to avert a tragedy of the commons, IEEE Internet Computing 1 (1997) 38-46.

    Google Scholar 

  9. A. Gupta, D.O. Stahl and A.B. Whinston, A stochastic equilibrium model of Internet pricing, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 21 (1997) 697-722.

    Google Scholar 

  10. A. Gupta, D.O. Stahl and A.B. Whinston, The economics of network management, Communications of the ACM 42 (1999) 57-63.

    Google Scholar 

  11. V. Jacobson and M.J. Karels, Congestion avoidance and control, in: Proc. of SIGCOMM’88 (1988).

  12. L. Kleinrock, Queueing Systems, Vols. I, II (Wiley, 1975).

  13. D. Kosiur, Building and Managing Virtual Private Networks (Wiley, 1998).

  14. A.A. Lazar and N. Semret, Design, analysis and simulation of the progressive second price auction for network bandwidth, in: 8th International Symposium on Dynamic Games and Applications (1998).

  15. Li, Mingzhi et al., Estimating Internet users’ demand characteristics, forthcoming in Journal of Computational Economics (2000), http://crec.bus.utexas.edu/works/articles/demand.pdf.

  16. Z. Lin et al., Exploring traffic pricing for the virtual private network, in: WITS’99 (1999).

  17. Z. Lin, D.O. Stahl and A.B. Whinston, A traffic-pricing model for the packet-switching network with prioritized round-robin queueing, in: INFORMS-CIST’00 (2000).

  18. J. MacKie-Mason and H. Varian, Pricing the Internet in Public Access to the Internet, eds. B. Kahin and J. Keller (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  19. J. Nagle, Congestion control in TCP/IP Internetworks, Internet RFC 896 (1984), http://www.ietf.cnri. reston.va.us/rfc/rfc896.txt.

  20. A.M. Odlyzko, A modest proposal for preventing Internet congestion, DIMACS Technical Report 97-68 (1997), http://www.dimacs.rutgers.edu/TechnicalReports/.

  21. R. Oppliger, Internet and Intranet Security (Artech House, 1998).

  22. V. Paxson and S. Floyd, Wide-area traffic: The failure of poisson modeling, IEEE/ACMTransactions on Networking 3(3) (1995).

  23. C. Rigney et al., Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS), Internet-draft (2000), http:// www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-radius-radius-v2-06.txt.

  24. C. Rigney and Livingston, RADIUS Accounting, Internet RFC 2139 (1997), http://www.ietf.org/rfc/ rfc2139.txt.

  25. S. Shenker et al., Pricing in computer networks: Reshaping the research agenda, Telecommunication Policy 20 (1996) 183-201.

    Google Scholar 

  26. D.O. Stahl and A.B. Whinston, A general economic equilibrium model of distributed computing, in: New Decisions in Computational Economics, eds. W.W. Cooper and A.B. Whinston (1994) pp. 175-189.

  27. W. Stevens, TCP slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit, and fast recovery algorithms, Internet RFC2001 (1997), http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/rfc/rfc2001.txt.

  28. P. Tang and C. Tai, Network traffic characterization using Token Bucket model, in: Proceedings of IEEE InfoCom 99, Vol. 1 (1999).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Business Administration, Texas Tech University, USA

    Zhangxi Lin

  2. CREC, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

    Peng Si Ow & Andrew B. Whinston

  3. Department of Economics, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

    Dale O. Stahl

Authors
  1. Zhangxi Lin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Peng Si Ow
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Dale O. Stahl
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Andrew B. Whinston
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Lin, Z., Ow, P.S., Stahl, D.O. et al. Exploring Traffic Pricing for the Virtual Private Network. Information Technology and Management 3, 301–327 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019768706951

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019768706951

Search

Navigation