A pricing mechanism for scalable video delivery

Abstract.

Many video applications tolerate continuous media (CM) scaling. Scaling is acceptable due to human tolerance to degradation in picture quality, frame loss, and end-to-end delay. CM scaling enables the network to utilize its resources efficiently for supporting additional customers and to increase its revenue. However, due to quality degradation, users will not be willing to tolerate scaling unless it is coupled with monetary or availability incentives. We propose a pricing policy and a corresponding admission control scheme for scalable video applications. The pricing policy is two-tiered, based on a connection set-up component and a scalable component. Connections that are more scalable are charged less, but are more liable to be degraded. The proposed policy trades off performance degradation with monetary incentives to improve user benefit and network revenue and to decrease the blocking probability of connection requests. We demonstrate by means of simulation that this policy encourages users to specify the scalability of an application to the network.