Broadband network quality of service and pricing

End-to-end quality of service is critical to the success of current and future networked applications. Applications, such as real-time actions and transactions, should be given priority over less critical ones (such as web surfing). Furthermore, many multimedia applications require delay or delay variation guarantees for acceptable performance. Weighted fairness is also important both among customers or aggregates (depending on the tariff or subscription), and also within an aggregate (for example, to prevent starvation among sessions or service categories). Modern communication networks will allow a wide variety of traffic streams to share the same broadband link. A connection, which might be a mixture of voice, video and data, would appear to the network as a stream of packets, and the aim is that these calls may be efficiently integrated to share common resources. In particular, there is expected to be applications that are able to modify their data transfer rates according to the available bandwidth within the network. Traffic from such applications is termed elastic; typical examples are TCP traffic over the Internet and the Available Bit Rate transfer capability of Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks. One key issue concerns how the available bandwidth within such networks should be shared between competing streams of elastic traffic, in particular, it is an issue of the stability, fairness and the pricing of rate control algorithms. This thesis explores mechanisms and tools that will enable network service providers to optimize their operations and make them economically viable, and to provide, through pricing, sufficient attractions to users of network services that will help smooth spikes in demand and lead to a more efficient utilization of the available resources. Proposed model for charging and rate control is suitable for an integrated service network (e.g. available bit rate in ATM networks or Internet supporting QoS). In the near future, always on mobile devices will change the use of the network resources. These new services will give to our charging model a new and interesting, yet unknown, possibilities.