Framework to support pricing on the internet

This study focuses on the issue of QoS control mechanism using the pricing technology. The main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of a pricing based QoS control framework, which is used to support multiple service discrimination and to improve the end-to-end QoS performance within the economic constraints. The important difference from the proposals of other researchers is that, our QoS control loop is implemented at both the client and the router side. It consists of three fundamental components: the Local Pricing Agent (LPA), Intelligent Agent (IA) and Pricing Broker (PB).Doctor of Philosophy (SCE