Bharat Sukhwani, Hong Min, et al.
IEEE Micro
Introduction of differentiated services on the Internet has failed primarily due to many economic impediments. We focus on the provider competition aspect, and develop a multi-class queueing network game framework to study it. Each network service provider is modeled as a single-server multi-class queue. Providers post prices for various service classes. Traffic is elastic and there are multiple types of it, each traffic-type is sensitive to a different degree to Quality of Service (QoS). Arriving users choose a provider and a class for service. We study the pricing and service competition between the providers in a game-theoretic setting. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence of Nash equilibrium in the Bertrand (pricing) game between the multi-class queueing service providers. We also characterize the inefficiency (price of anarchy) due to strategic DiffServ pricing.