Network Economics For Next Generation Networks

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Internet Charging and QoS Technologies, ICQT 2009, held in Aachen, Germany, in May 2009 collocated with the IFIP Networking 2009 conference. The 9 revised full papers presented together with the extended abstract of a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 26 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on competition models, pricing mechanisms, and economics of inter-domain traffic. Bringing together researchers from the area of technology and economy in both industry and academia to discuss key improvements and to support further progress in these fields, ICQT 2009 features combination of micro-economic models, auctions, game theoretic approaches, peer-to-peer, and IMS-based charging.

Starting with the imminent roll-out of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and fourth-Generation networking technology, Next Generation Networks (NGN) are gradually becoming reality, with charging and Quality-of-Service (QoS) issues as two of the key drivers for the evolution toward the convergent all-IP network of the future. Therefore, the 6th International Workshop on Internet Charging and QoS Technology (ICQT 2009) was devoted to discussing the most recent approaches, models, and mechanisms in this highly interesting and important research area. The present volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series includes those papers presented at ICQT 2009—collocated this year with the IFIP Networking 2009 conference—taking place on May 15, 2009, in Aachen, Germany and hosted by the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH Aachen). For the commercial success of future QoS-enabled communication services, the emergence of viable business models, pricing schemes, and charging and accounting mechanisms is of paramount importance. Problems in this domain can only be addressed through a broad interdisciplinary approach linking together a variety of technical and economic perspectives, which are constantly driving a plethora of relevant research t- ics for application developers, business architects, network providers, service providers, and customers. Within the current trend toward a convergent NGN architecture, compe- tion modeling, pricing mechanisms, and the economics of inter-domain traffic are of specific importance and urgency. Thus, they determined—in the form of three technical sessions—the core of the ICQT 2009 program.

Next Generation Networks (NGN) provide ubiquitous connectivity with pervasive accessibility to service, application, content and information. NGN will bring tremendous advantages to companies and individuals, in terms of access to information, education and knowledge, efficiency, dematerialisation and new user experiences. Next Generation Networks: Perspectives and Potentials explores the potentials of NGN and provides an outlook of future services for the end users and opportunities for the traditional network operators and new players. It creates a framework to aid the understanding of NGN, exploring the strategic development and practical deployment of NGN. This book provides a complete and comprehensive picture of the future directions, substantial benefits, issues, applications and services for NGN. Offers an in-depth exploration of NGN covering both basic and advanced concepts Examines critical issues with the implementation of NGN Covers NGN technology, architecture, transport, services, and evolution and standardization. Written by industry experts focusing on the business opportunities of NGN with chapters on NGN standardization, development and corporate responsibility Next Generation Networks is ideal for network operators, equipment vendors, researchers, Telecoms regulators and engineers working in next generation networking. It will also be of interest to graduate students on electrical engineering and computer science programmes with a focus on networks.

An up-to-date guide to the economic issues in telecommunications, delivering a comprehensive overview from mathematical models to practical applications. Covering hot topics such as app stores, auctions for advertisements, search engine business models, network neutrality and virtual network operators, this resource is ideal for graduate students, researchers and industry practitioners.

This book provides a game theoretic model of interaction among VoIP telecommunications providers regarding their willingness to enter peering agreements with one another. The author shows that the incentive to peer is generally based on savings from otherwise payable long distance fees. At the same time, termination fees can have a countering and dominant effect, resulting in an environment in which VoIP firms decide against peering. Various scenarios of peering and rules for allocation of the savings are considered. The first part covers the relevant aspects of game theory and network theory, trying to give an overview of the concepts required in the subsequent application. The second part of the book introduces first a model of how the savings from peering can be calculated and then turns to the actual formation of peering relationships between VoIP firms. The conditions under which firms are willing to peer are then described, considering the possible influence of a regulatory body.

Multimedia Interactive Protocols and Systems (MIPS) is the brand new name of a workshop that has been successfully held for the ?rst time in 2002 in Coimbra, as the ?rst joint edition of two well established series of workshops: Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems (IDMS) and Protocols for Multimedia Systems (PROMS). The area covered by Multimedia Interactive Protocols and Systems is indeed broad, since it includes technical and practical issues related to d- tributed multimedia technologies, applications and services, with emphasis on their deployment over next generation networks. The topics set for MIPS 2003 were: mobile and wireless multimedia systems; multimedia middleware and communication protocols; Quality of Service issues; resource management for multimedia services; active and programmable netw- king for multimedia applications; mobile agents for multimedia; multimedia d- tribution and transport; tra?c engineering and service engineering; ubiquitous computing; networked audio-video devices; development tools for distributed multimedia applications; multimedia applications such as video-on-demand, - gital video libraries, video games, virtual community, teleworking, teleteaching, e-commerce, virtual reality simulations; performance of protocols and applica- ons;contentmanagement;serviceaccess;security,authentication,privacy,wat- marking; accounting and tari? policing for multimedia teleservices; multimedia encoding and compression. The Call for Papers attracted more than 130 submissions from Europe, Asia and the Americas, covering most of the proposed topics. With the help of a very dedicated Program Committee and of a number of associate reviewers, subm- sions were carefully evaluated, with an average of three reviewers for each paper.

"This book presents state-of-the-art research, developments, and integration activities in combined platforms of heterogeneous wireless networks"--Provided by publisher.

Next Generation Network (NGN) is an innovative revenue stream for the service providers from the increase of their service offerings. Therefore, it is important to understand how proposed solutions in NGN markets can enable flexible and easy service creation, delivery and management both to service providers as well as third party application developers. Consequently, this book provides guidelines for the NGN service platforms evaluation, in terms of functionality, programmability, flexibility, openness, and inter-operability. In other words, the objective is to revise some of the major benefits promised by NGN, namely productivity, creativity and new revenues from new business opportunities, and to overhaul how well current product offerings can support these capabilities with available service development tools.