Resumen
The article outlines requirements, characteristics and performance of an ideal price-setting mechanism of pricing computer network traffic, which would be essential to manage network traffic and to control and provide different Quality of Service (QoS), required by different applications and users. The realization comes from market forces, changing network infrastructure, projected Internet application base, projected use of the network and the performance requirements of network users. Decentralized price computation provides a high degree of protection against disruption due to network failure and congestion, the informational and computational requirements of price-computing mechanisms are minimal, it provides an economic rationale for multiple levels of QoS and also, will prevent the misuse of the network by redistributing the user demand patterns. The article emphasizes the necessity to do research, in order to implement, pricing mechanisms for network traffic as challenges arise from network infrastructure, integration with network protocols and ownership structure.