End-to-end availability-dependent pricing of network services

We discuss how a new pricing scheme can be integrated within a communication network. The pricing scheme is based on the availability of end-to-end communications, and is an alternative to congestion pricing, which is not applicable when communication capacity is higher than demand (as happens in most communication backbone networks). We also investigate how, based on this scheme, an optimization algorithm for updating the network topology can be applied. The network update problem is modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem, which is approximately solved using a Genetic Algorithm. The good results obtained in a case study show that the method is robust and can be applied even when end-to-end availability measures can only be computed approximately (in this case, using a Monte Carlo method). This research is part of the PAIR associated research project, supported by the INRIA, France, and has also received the support of ECOS-Sud, under Action U03E02. The participation of Pablo Rodríguez was supported by the French Embassy in Uruguay as part of the French Ministère des Affaires étrangères scientific cooperation program; and by the “Programa de Jóvenes Investigadores” of CSIC, UDELAR, Uruguay.