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This article outlined the requirements, characteristics, and performance of an ideal price-setting mechanism. These prices could be computed in a completely decentralized manner. Decentralized price computation provides a high degree of protection against disruption due to network failure and congestion. Furthermore, with decentralized computing, the informational and computational requirements of price-computing mechanisms are minimal. One of the most significant benefits of this approach is that it provides an economic rationale for multiple levels of QoS. It will also provide incentives to maintain required QoS levels and will prevent the misuse of the network by redistributing the user demand patterns. Such a pricing mechanism can be used when the network is using different protocols for different types of applications, for example, ATM for real-time applications and TCP/IP for applications requiring only best-effort service.
Gupta et al. (Wed,) studied this question.