Proposal of an Inter-AS Policy Routing and a Flow Pricing Scheme to Improve ASes’ Profits

Abstract

At present, the global Internet consists of many ASes. Each AS pays a pre-determined connection fee to another AS for connecting its network with another AS’s network. The connection fee type charging may be rational in case of transferring the best-effort type traffic. However, usage charging is necessary to transferring the resource guaranteed type traffic such as the Intserv traffic and the Diffserv traffic. In this case, each AS pays a per-flow fee to another AS every time it routes a flow into another AS. The per-flow fees paid by each AS becomes a part of the cost for that AS. Thus, each AS needs to select a route with the lowest price for each inter-AS flow to improve its profit. In this paper, we call such an inter-AS routing scheme a price-based inter-AS routing scheme. When each AS has a request to route an inter-AS flow, it can select an inter-AS route with the lowest price to improve its profit by this routing scheme. Firstly, we propose a method to realize the price-based inter- AS routing scheme. Next, we propose cost-dependent pricing scheme suitable for the price-based inter-AS routing scheme. The cost-dependent pricing scheme can reduce frequency of exchanging price information between ASes. However, in the cost-dependent pricing scheme, profit in each AS depends on the distribution of path costs in that AS. Thus, we propose a routing policy for ASes with narrow ranges of path costs to improve their profits efficiently and verify its effect using a simple routing model.