DELAY MINIMIZATION AND PRICING METHOD FOR THE NETWORK SERVICES

SUMMARY This paper proposes a scheduling model for ensuring delay as a Quality of Service requirement in the communications network. Different delays are allocated for different pricing classes, say gold, silver, and bronze classes. Our purpose is to minimize weighted mean delay for connections, where weights are the pricing factors of different classes. An adaptive and optimal solution is derived for weights of the scheduler. Simulations show that in addition to the mean delay minimization, the revenue of the service provider is also maximized in the linear pricing scenario. In addition, adaptive updating rule is simple to implement, since it converges fast. Our scenario is independent on the statistical assumptions, and therefore it is robust against possible erroneous estimates of the customers' behavior.