Quality of service requirements are satisfied conjointly by the service model, which determines how resources are shared and by network engineering, which determines how much capacity is provided. In this paper we consider the impact of the adopted charging scheme on the feasibility of fulfilling QoS requirements. We identify three categories of charging scheme based respectively on flat rate pricing, congestion pricing and transaction pricing.

This paper discusses two approaches to statistical multiplexing: rate envelope multiplexing, allowing resource sharing with small delays for low peak rate connections, and rate sharing, based on the use of large multiplexer buffers to ensure high link utilization for high speed data traffic. We argue that the weighted fair queueing scheduling algorithm provides an efficient means for combining both kinds of multiplexing in the B-ISDN. A feasible implementation known as Virtual Spacing is outlined. We illustrate the flexibility of the proposed scheme by showing how different service categories could be provided.