Pricing the Internet With Multibid Auctions

Abstract

Abstract-Usage-based or congestion-based charging schemes have been regarded as a relevant way to control congestion and to differentiate services among users in telecommunication networks; auctioning for bandwidth appears as one of several possibilities. In a previous work, the authors designed a multi-bid auction scheme where users compete for bandwidth at a link by submitting several couples (amount of bandwidth asked, associated unit price) so that the link allocates the bandwidth and computes the charge according to the second price principle. They showed that incentive compatibility and efficiency among other properties are verified. We propose in the present paper to extend this scheme to the case of a network, by using the properties/assumptions that the backbone network is over-provisioned and the access networks have a tree structure.

Extended second price auctions for Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PEV) charging in smart distribution grids

“…MSP and PSP auction mechanisms or their analogues have been considered in prior work, mostly in the context of bandwidth allocation in the Internet [14]- [20]. The MSP mechanism is related to the notion of multi-bid auctions investigated in [19], [20].…”

“…The MSP mechanism is related to the notion of multi-bid auctions investigated in [19], [20]. The application context, and the network model is significantly different however; in particular our system reduces to a bipartite network graph whereas [19], [20] studies a single node (single block of divisible resource) or resources connected as a tree network topology.…”

“…The MSP mechanism is related to the notion of multi-bid auctions investigated in [19], [20]. The application context, and the network model is significantly different however; in particular our system reduces to a bipartite network graph whereas [19], [20] studies a single node (single block of divisible resource) or resources connected as a tree network topology. While the broad nature of our approximation results (for incentive compatibility and social optimality) are similar to those in these prior work, our mechanism is slightly different -which we believe not only makes it more practical to implement it (in our application context at least), but also allows much simpler proofs of the results.…”

Analysis of Price Competition in a Slotted Resource Allocation Game

“…It has also been regarded as a way to introduce fairness among users with respect to the traditional flat-rate pricing where light consumers pay as much as big ones. Therefore, there have been many proposals for new pricing schemes motivated by different objectives: the network planner may want to elicit users to efficiently share the scarce network resources in order to maximize social welfare (see, among others, [1,2,3,4]), to guarantee fairness among users [5,6], or to maximize revenue [7,8,9,10]; the typical modeling tool being that of noncooperative game theory [11]. For surveys on pricing in telecommunication networks, the reader is advised to look at [12,13,14].…”

Market clearing price and equilibria of the progressive second price mechanism

“…Therefore, pricing mechanisms that constitute an incentive to regulate consumption may replace in the future the current flat-rate schemes, with which congestion is more likely to happen. The recent literature on the subject shows the importance of developping new allocation and pricing mechanisms: many papers propose pricing solutions, for wireless [1,16] and wired networks [6,8,10,11,18].…”