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From charging for Quality of Service to charging for Quality of Experience

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Abstract

Providing Quality of Service (QoS) differentiation in future IP-based networks is closely linked to the concurrent implementation of appropriate pricing and charging mechanisms. Thus, in recent years, a broad range of QoS-based charging mechanisms have been proposed, ranging from Paris Metro Pricing and effective bandwidth pricing to the Cumulus Pricing Scheme or the Contract and Balancing Mechanism. However, the strongly increasing interest in Quality of Experience (QoE/QoX) so far has not led to a comparable burst of research activity in the Internet Economics community. Therefore, in order to highlight this important paradigm shift from a charging perspective, we first will review the most prominent QoS-based charging schemes and provide some discussion on lessons learned. In the next step, we describe the imminent transition from QoS to QoX from an economic point of view and discuss recent proposals for pricing of QoX. The paper ends with an outlook on current and future work in this highly interesting research field.

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Notes

  1. In contrast to the more widespread “QoE,” the acronym “QoX” for Quality of Experience has been used in the related work only quite recently (see, e.g., [20]). Note that in the course of this paper, we will argue how to understand QoX as an even broader concept than QoE.

  2. CATI—Charging and Accounting Technology for the Internet. Swiss National Foundation Project, running 1998–2000.

  3. M3I—Market-Managed Multiservice Internet, EU FP5 project, running 1999–2001.

  4. CA$HMAN—Charging and Accounting Schemes in Multiservice ATM Networks. EU ACTS project, running 1995–1998.

  5. Including constraints like “1,000 voice minutes within the own network, 1,000 min to other mobile networks, 1,000 min to the fixed network, plus 1,000 SMS per month.”

  6. BACCARDI (Beyond Architectural Convergence: Charging, SeCurity, Applications, Realization and Demonstration of IMS over fixed and wireless networks) is an application-oriented COMET project running 2008–2009 at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.)

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Acknowledgments

This research has been performed within the projects U-0 and COM-4 at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.) and has been funded by the Austrian Government and the City of Vienna within the competence center program COMET. Additional support from INRIA Bretagne-Atlantique Rennes, France, during research stays in summer 2008 and summer 2009 is gratefully acknowledged. The author would like to thank Joachim Fabini, Marco Happenhofer, and Christoph Egger for their contribution to the initial version of this paper and their help with the prototype implementation, as well as Tom Lovric, Christoph Brandner, and all colleagues involved in the ftw. projects SUPRA, CAMPARI, CAIPIRINA, and BACCARDI for many helpful discussions during the course of this work.

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    Peter Reichl

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Reichl, P. From charging for Quality of Service to charging for Quality of Experience. Ann. Telecommun. 65, 189–199 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-009-0144-8

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