From QoS to QoX: A Charging Perspective

Abstract

Quality-of-Service differentiation has traditionally been one of the key drivers for pricing current and future Internet services. As a result, a broad range of QoS-based charging mechanisms have been proposed, ranging from Paris Metro Pricing over Effective Bandwidth Charging up to the Cumulus Pricing Scheme or the Contract-Balancing Mechanism. The recent interest in Quality-of-Experience (QoE/QoX), however, so far has not led to a similar burst of research activity in the Internet Economics community. This paper starts with reviewing and discussing the most prominent QoS-based charging schemes and provides some discussion on lessons learned before investigating the transition from QoS to QoX from a charging perspective. Some recent proposals for pricing QoX are introduced and a prototypical implementation in the framework of an open source 3GPP IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) project is presented. The paper ends with an out-look on current and future work in this highly interesting re-search field.

Quality-of-Service differentiation has traditionally been one of the key drivers for pricing current and future Internet services. As a result, a broad range of QoS-based charging mechanisms have been proposed, ranging from Paris Metro Pricing over Effective Bandwidth Charging up to the Cumulus Pricing Scheme or the Contract-Balancing Mechanism. The recent interest in Quality-of-Experience (QoE/QoX), however, so far has not led to a similar burst of research activity in the Internet Economics community. This paper starts with reviewing and discussing the most prominent QoS-based charging schemes and provides some discussion on lessons learned before investigating the transition from QoS to QoX from a charging perspective. Some recent proposals for pricing QoX are introduced and a prototypical implementation in the framework of an open source 3GPP IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) project is presented. The paper ends with an out-look on current and future work in this highly interesting re-search field.