From Charging for QoS to Charging for QoE: Internet Economics in the Era of Next Generation Multimedia Networks

Abstract

Over the past years, telecommunications as a research area has grown far beyond pure communications engineering and today covers the entire economic value chain up to the end customer. As a consequence, “Internet Economics” has been established as a new and promising research area of its own, aiming at a fresh perspective on familiar problems. The basic idea of this interdisciplinary approach is to understand communication networks as economical rather than technical systems, and thus to describe and solve networking issues through the use of economic concepts and techniques. This tutorial gives an introduction into basic notions, concepts and results of this highly interdisciplinary field. We start with summarizing the fundamental framework, focusing on central concepts from operations research, game theory and micro-economics, and introduce basic concepts like equilibria, efficiency, competition models and fairness. This serves as starting point for a comprehensive review of traditional charging schemes like congestion pricing, smart market and Progressive Second-Price auctions, Paris Metro Pricing, effective bandwidth pricing, Cumulus Pricing and the Contract-Balancing Mechanism. The second part of the tutorial starts with a brief overview on relevant charging protocols and architectures, with a special emphasis on the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as a promising candidate for an All-IP Next Generation Network architecture. Finally, we discuss the imminent paradigm shift from charging for Quality-of-Service (QoS) to charging for Quality-of-User Experience (QoE) and present two recent proposals as important examples of current research trends in this stimulating area.