The impact of revenues on delivering differentiated IP multimedia services in wired/wireless networks

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the revenues on delivering IP-based multimedia services with different quality of service (QoS) requirements to mobile users. We consider that a network provider offers two distinct grades of services to which users may subscribe: Premium, or Economy. A simple revenue model is defined to calculate the total revenues generated due to the traffic downloaded by both types of subscribers. Premium class users pay a higher tariff for their connection to receive a higher level of quality, measured by a set of parameters such as call blocking probability, coding rate, and format of the multimedia services. The delivery of multimedia services is enabled by our proposed QoS-based filtering architecture that guarantees the contractual level of QoS requirements for each type of media (e.g., video, voice and data), while maximizing the links' throughput. According to this architecture, filters are installed at the output port of every node of the network and are able to change the coding rates in accordance with the results of a multi-objective optimization function. Simulations results prove that the gain in the number of admitted users is not simply limited by the maximum available link capacity but it is, rather, bounded by the additional revenue gained by admitting those new users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.