As the Internet makes the transition from research testbed to commercial enterprise, the topic of pricing in computer networks has suddenly attracted great attention. Much of the discussion in the network design community and the popular press centers on the usage-based vs. fiat pricing debate. The more academic literature has largely focused on devising optimal pricing policies; achieving optimal welfare requires charging marginal congestion costs for usage. In this paper we critique this optimality paradigm on three grounds: (1) marginal cost prices may not produce sufficient revenue to fully recover costs and so are perhaps of limited relevance, (2) congestion costs are inherently inaccessible to the network and so cannot reliably form the basis for pricing, and (3) there are other, more structural, goals besides optimality, and some of these goals are incompatible with the global uniformity required for optimal pricing schemes. For these reasons, we contend that the research agenda on pricing in computer network should shift away from the optimality paradigm and focus more on structural and architectural issues. Such issues include allowing local control of pricing policies,

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Multimedia applications require a guaranteed level of service for accessing Continuous Media (CM) data, such asvideo and audio. To obtain such guarantees, the database server where the data is residing must employ an admission control scheme to limit the number of clients that can be served concurrently. We investigate the problem of on-line admission control where the decision on whether to accept or reject a request must be made without any knowledge about future requests. Employing competitive analysis techniques, we address the problem in its most general form with the following key contributions: (1) we prove a tight upper bound on the competitive ratio of the conventional Work-Conserving (WC) policy, showing that it is within a factor 1+ of the 1; optimal clairvoyant strategy that knows the entire request

Multimedia applications require a guaranteed level of service for accessing Continuous Media (CM) data, such as video and audio. To obtain such guarantees, the database server where the data is residing must employ an admission control scheme to limit the number of clients that can be served concurrently. We investigate the problem of on-line admission control where the decision on whether to accept or reject a request must be made without any knowledge about future requests. Employing competitive analysis techniques, we address the problem in its most general form with the following key contributions: (1) we prove a tight upper bound on the competitive ratio of the conventional Work-Conserving (WC) policy, showing that it is within a factor 1+\Delta 1\Gammaae of the optimal clairvoyant strategy that knows the entire request sequence in advance, where \Delta is the ratio of the maximum to minimum request length (that is, time duration), and ae is the maximum fraction of the server's ...