Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

While the recent strong increase of interest in Quality of Experience both in industry and academia has managed to place the end user again into the center of service quality evaluation, corresponding economic implications have not received similar attention within the research community yet. Therefore, in this section we point out some of the key links between the quality as delivered by the network, as perceived by the user, and as valued by the market. The example of logarithmic utility functions allows demonstrating how this broad interdisciplinary approach is able to provide significant contributions in describing and analyzing future telecommunication ecosystems in a holistic way.

This section addresses the automated and legally compliant determination of key contract parameters for commercially and internationally provided electronic services in the Internet. It designs and implements a decision support system that provides recommendations on suited contract parameters at the time of contract formation. Recommendations base on automated reasoning taking into consideration the relevant set of service- and contract-specific facts. The range of facts to be considered is imposed by the laws of these states that have sufficient connection with the international service contract to be concluded. Accordingly, this section develops and documents the solid basis for the decision support system, consisting of an information model that integrates perspectives of service and contract management as well as in a detailed method to formally model the legal basis for machine execution.

We analyze in this section game-theoretic models of competition between telecommunication networks providers in various contexts. This analysis helps to define and understand the operators’ pricing and technology investments as well as the most efficient market rules by a regulator.

The paradigm shift from centralized services into hundreds of thousands of decentralized services changes traffic directions and patterns in the Internet. In that light, overlay providers form logical communication topologies, which effect the underlying telcos’ as well as Internet Service Providers’ (ISP) traffic and network management. Thus, Economic Traffic Management (ETM) principles deal with incentives, decentralized traffic generation, and modern applications, such as integrated Video-on-Demand and live streaming approaches. Therefore, this work overviews the very recent work on ETM mechanisms, especially driven by the SmoothIT project, and on LiveShift, combining efficiently architectural and system demands for an incentive-driven application management. Furthermore, this section describes in examples, provides evidences, and concludes that ETM and LiveShift can pave an efficient path to modern application support of distributed overlay traffic management, which benefits telcos, ISPs, overlay providers, and end users, if all or parts of them see the right incentives to cooperate, behave well, or interact.

Autonomic management is receiving intense interest from academia and industry, aiming to simplify and automate network management operations. Autonomic management or self-management capabilities aim to vanish inside devices, relieving both managers and users from tedious configuration and troubleshooting procedures. Ideally, self-managed devices integrate self-configuration, self-optimization, self-protection and self-healing capabilities. When combined, these capabilities can lead to adaptive and ultimately self-maintained autonomic systems.

Even though in many parts of the world people enjoy the features of modern telecommunication services, a significant number of inhabitants in rural areas are deprived of access to such facilities. In this text we propose how we can utilize existing technologies for the provision of telecommunication facilities in rural areas: IP telephony based upon open source software and off-the-shelf hardware and voice messaging based upon the Delay Tolerant Networking paradigm.

This section discusses the protection of electrical power systems (EPS) and its relation to the supporting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure. Several dimensions are addressed, ranging from the need of protection and available protection schemes to the identification of faults and disturbances. The challenges brought by recognizing the interdependent nature of today’s and future’s EPS and ICT infrastructures are also highlighted, based on the Smart Grid and the System of Systems perspectives.

While user dependence on ICT is rising and the information security situation is worsening at an alarming rate, IT industry is not able to answer accurately and in time questions like “How secure is our information system?” Consequently, information security risk management is reactive and is lagging behind incidents. To overcome this problem, risk management paradigm has to change from reactive to active and from qualitative to quantitative. In this section, we present a computerized risk management approach that enables active risk management and is aligned with the leading initiative to make security measurable and manageable. Furthermore, we point out qualitative methods deficiencies and argue about the importance of use of quantitative over qualitative methods in order to improve accuracy of information security feedback information. Finally, we present two quantitative metrics, used together in the model, and enabling a quantitative risk assessment and support risk treatment decision making.

The field of telecommunications and its relations to economics, regulation, and policies, combined with the technology and operations of large, decentralized networks is an enormous one. In that respect, the goal of the COST Action IS0605 “Econ@Tel” – A Telecommunications Economics COST Network – was to discuss, develop, and outline cross-disciplinary strategic research directions.