On the management of prices and policies for heterogeneous access environments

Abstract

The appearance of new services, as well as the unstoppable increase of the available radio access technologies, leads to a departure from the traditional strategies for the different actors involved in the wireless communications realm. It becomes necessary tackling the design of an architecture able to support the new challenges, being a key aspect breaking with some of the traditional solutions, which are unable to cope with the new requirements. One of the most important aspects is to address a holistic design, enforcing an open and flexible cooperation between the different entities, which is not usually possible with patches to the currently available alternatives. This is the framework of the Cognitive and Cooperative Communications and autonomous SErvices Management (C3SEM) project, which is founded on the cooperation and integration of the subjacent communication substratum with the service management architecture. In this paper, we describe one of its current open lines of research, in which we analyze different price management strategies, since it is sensible to believe that in the mid-term, operators would need to rethink their current strategies, which are mostly based on constant fees. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.