The Research On Internet Service Pricing Strategy

With the rapid development of Internet, the number of users and the content of Internet have become more and more large. How to design optimal pricing strategy to balance the benefit of users and ISP becomes very challenge. To solve this problem, current study design pricing strategy either from quality of service (QoS) aspect or from utility model. QoS sensitive pricing approaches mainly consider how to improve the satisfaction of users, while in this approach the ISP suffers from high cost of equipment development and maintenance. The utility model based pricing strategies can be used to balance the benefit between the users and the ISP, but it is difficult to satisfy the different requirement of different users. Joint solution of combining QoS and utility model can not only ensure the satisfaction of users but also balance the benefit of users and ISP.This dissertation focuses on network pricing strategy based on the joint solution of combining QoS and utility model. We explore the benefit-based relationships of operating networks by considering the benefits between users, ISPs and other ISPs. Furthermore, the corresponding models are built for network pricing, and extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of our models. Some creative works in this dissertation are mainly focused on the following aspects.(1) Existing pricing strategies lack incentive mechanism for the Internet usage and require high overhead of maintaining state information. We propose a diffServ-oriented network pricing strategy. The proposed strategy combines the utility model with the QoS to establish the pricing model and method. Firstly, based on the utility function, this paper allocates the optimal network resources to different users. Then, to balance the benefits between the users and the ISP, this paper computes the equilibrium price based on the resource allocation. At last, we conduct simulation experiments to validate the feasibility of our pricing strategy.(2) Existing model-based pricing strategy is difficult to meet the needs of users and the resource changes because it is not flexible. While existing usage-based pricing strategy leads to slow convergence speed and is hard to implementation because it has high computational complexity. This paper proposes a congestion sensitive pricing strategy which considers the combination of the QoS, utility model, and network congestion. In order to reduce the network congestion, a punishment price is introduced in the price strategy. Users should pay punishment price to the traffic beyond the allocated flow rate. Simulation results demonstrate that the congestion sensitive pricing strategy has the advantage of small amount of calculation, fast convergence speed and can efficiently reduce the congestion.(3) This paper proposes a Nash equilibrium based pricing strategy for optimal ISP inter-connection. By considering the QoS levels, in order to reduce the transmission price between ISPs, we use the Nash equilibrium of the game theory to analyze the benefit relationships of ISPs and make optimal network pricing among two or more ISPs. This strategy can ensure the optimal topological relations between ISPs varying with time. Simulation results demonstrate the affectivity of the proposed strategy.(4) This paper proposes a network pricing strategy for Internet market based on Nash bargaining game. In order to reduce the flow transmission consumption of the system, this strategy not only considers the benefit relationship among the ISPs but also the relationship between the ISP and users by using Nash bargaining game of Nash equilibrium. This strategy can not only determine topological relations between ISPs, and the relationship between the ISP and users. Both mathematical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the affectivity and feasibility of the proposed strategy.