Cost-based admission control for Internet Commerce QoS enhancement

In many e-commerce systems, preserving Quality of Service (QoS) is crucial to keep a competitive edge. Poor QoS translates into poor system resource utilisation, customer dissatisfaction and profit loss. In this paper, a cost-based admission control (CBAC) approach is described which is a novel approach to preserve QoS in Internet Commerce systems. CBAC is a dynamic mechanism which uses a congestion control technique to maintain QoS while the system is online. Rather than rejecting customer requests in a high-load situation, a discount-charge model which is sensitive to system current load and navigational structure is used to encourage customers to postpone their requests. A scheduling mechanism with load forecasting is used to schedule user requests in more lightly loaded time periods. Experimental results showed that the use of CBAC at high load achieves higher profit, better utilisation of system resources and service times competitive with those which are achievable during lightly loaded periods. Throughput is sustained at reasonable levels and request failure at high load is dramatically reduced. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.