Pricing in Telecommunication Networks: Some Issues and Models
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Keynote Speaker: Bruno Tuffin, INRIA, France
Abstract

The Internet has experienced a tremendous success. Starting from an
academic (and somewhat free) communication network, it has been expanded
to commercial purposes and has led to congestion. The way customers are
currently charged is based on a so-called flat-rate price: they pay a
fixed subscription fee to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and have an
unlimited access to the network. This simple and attractive method is
nonetheless unfair since it does not discriminate users. Introducing new
pricing schemes seems a valuable option for allowing congestion control
and service differentiation among users or applications. While congestion
hardly occur in the backbone network, we still have to investigate ways to
control it in access networks, the so-called last mile problem, with a
special emphasis on wireless. The challenge is therefore to design a
pricing scheme representing a good trade-off between economic efficiency
and engineering simplicity and that both users and providers would accept.
During this talk, we will review few models for pricing bandwidth usage.
We will also briefly present other contexts where pricing seems an
appropriate way to incentivize users to participe by rewarding them in
situations where each new user introduces an added-value to the network
capability, such as for example in ad-hoc networks or peer-to-peer
networks. A current research direction we will emphasize comes from the
observation that there is not only a relation between customers and
providers, but also a competition among providers and heterogeneous
technologies, and this aspect needs to be integrated in the models and
proposals. A typical example is the competition for access points at a
WiFi hotspot, or the choice between different access media (WiFi, WiMax,
UMTS, etc.). Similarly, pricing is also now a requirement among
competitive providers themselves, which need to exchange traffic to ensure
end-to-end delivery. Those points are still in their infancy and we will
introduce the challenges and some proposals.
This talk is at the heart of cross-disciplinary and novel aspects of
networks and system management, on the economics of infrastructure
management. It involves networking techniques, quantitative network
modeling and model evaluation methods, economy themes, game theory,
control theory and optimisation.
Biography
Bruno Tuffin received his PhD degree in applied mathematics from the
University of Rennes 1 (France) in 1997. Since then, he has been with
INRIA in Rennes. He spent eight months as a postdoc at Duke University in
1999. His research interests include developing Monte Carlo and
quasi-Monte Carlo simulation techniques for the performance evaluation of
telecommunication systems, and developing new Internet-pricing schemes and
telecommunication-related economical models. He has published close to one
hundred papers on those issues. He is currently Associate Editor for
INFORMS Journal on Computing, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer
Simulation and Mathematical Methods of Operations Research. He has written
or co-written two books devoted to simulation: Rare event simulation using
Monte Carlo methods published by John Wiley & Sons in 2009, and La
simulation de Monte Carlo (in French), published by Hermes Editions in
2010. His web page is http://www.irisa.fr/dionysos/pages_perso/tuffin/Tuffin_en.htm.