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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.BiographyPeter Reichl has studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Munich and Cambridge (UK). After receiving his diploma he was member of the scientific staff at RWTH Aachen, Bell Labs (Murray Hill, NJ), and ETH Zurich, where he finished his PhD thesis on tariff and traffic modeling for the Internet. Since 2001, he is working as Key Researcher at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.), being responsible for the research area "Economic and User Aspects of Telecommunications" and leading several strategic and application-oriented projects in the areas of Internet Economics, Human-Computer Interaction, wireless networks and 3GPP IMS. Dr. Reichl has published more than 70 scientific papers in the areas of Internet Economics, mobile and wireless networks, user-perceived QoS, traffic engineering, network management and performance evaluation. From 2001 to 2006, he served as co-chair of the annual international workshop series on "Internet Charging and QoS Technology" (ICQT, http://www.ftw.at/icqt) and was active as co-editor of several special journal issues on Internet Economics, e.g. with the Journal of Computer Communications and the Journal of Computer Networks. His teaching experience includes a variety of tutorials for an industry-related audience at FTW as well as academic courses, e.g. in "Network Management" and "Distributed Systems" at University of Essen, and more recently as Distinguished Guest Lecturer on "Fundamentals of Telecommunication Economics" at TU Graz. |
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