Traditionally, network operators have used simple flat-rate broadband data plans for both wired and wireless network access. But today, with the popularity of mobile devices and exponential growth of apps, videos, and clouds, service providers are gradually moving towards more sophisticated pricing schemes, including dynamic pricing. This decade will therefore likely witness a major change in ways in which network resources are managed and the role of economics in allocating these resources. This survey reviews some of the well-known past broadband pricing proposals (both static and dynamic), including their current realization in various consumer data plans around the world, and discusses several research challenges and open questions. By exploring the benefits and challenges of pricing data, this paper attempts to facilitate both the industrial and the academic communities’ efforts in understanding the existing literature, recognizing new trends, and shaping an appropriate and timely research agenda.

In this paper, we attempt to provide a unified framework to study the optimal joint schedul-ing, admission control, and incentive compatible pricing mechanism. To this end, we study a problem setting in which a capacity-constrained service provider (server) modelled as anM/M/1 queueing system intends to serve several segments of customers. Each customer requests the same amount of task, but they are heterogeneous in two attributes: their willingness to pay, and their willingness to wait, both of which are privately observed by this customer but are unknown to the server. We show that a well-designed menu of probabilistic admission control along with priority pricing contracts may force customers to reveal their true valuations and at the same time induce customers that are more sensitive to the delay to opt for higher priorities. Thus, the probabilistic admission control allows the server to identify the customers that are willing to pay more for the service (thereby reducing the undesirable congestion), and consequently may enable the server to increase its revenue. Even though ex ante the server may exhibit specific preference over different groups of customers, the server may probabilistically admit more than one group to ensure incentive compatibility. Moreover, we find that randomized priority rule and strategic idleness can emerge as revenue maximizing solutions.

Abstract-Accounting is an old term that defines the activity of keeping records of the money. However, accounting in the Internet implies not only economic principles, but also engineering aspects. Accounting has been used for studying the impact on usage quotas, for dimensioning a provider infrastructure or for registering the data flow, among others. Each evolutionary step of the Internet has its implications in how the accounting process is performed. The new challenges of the Future Internet and the Next-Generation Networks (NGN) reveal the need of a revision of the accounting process. Against this background, we present a taxonomy of the accounting process of the Internet. This taxonomy classifies all the functions involved in accounting in a hierarchical structure, representing their behaviour. The resulting taxonomy helps defining the terminology, requirements and working framework of all the accounting-related studies. Further, it helps through the learning, teaching and assessing process in the area of accounting.

Applying Congestion Pricing at Access Points for Voice and Data Traffic by Jimmy Ssu-Ging Shih Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering-Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley Professor Randy H. Katz, Chair For alleviating network congestion, many researchers [24-26] have advocated the use of congestion pricing, varying prices according to load, as a feedback mechanism for modifying user demand. However, it is not clear whether it can be designed to be acceptable to users and still be effective for operators. Thus we investigate user interface and system issues by applying congestion pricing at access points for voice and data traffic.

The Dissertation Committee for Sohel Q. Khan certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Content provides a way for business to increase revenues on the Internet. However, the key to increasing revenues through content is efficient billing. Therefore this paper introduces an architecture for selling XML content. The architecture is based on a family of models that provides a guide to the requirements for a content-based billing system in XML environments incorporating various pricing strategy options. XML gives a content-based billing system device, platform and media independence.