Contribuciones a la gestion de la tarificacion basada en politicas segun calidad de servicio: aplicacion a redes de comunicaciones moviles avanzadas heterogeneas

The modern society demands more and more different types of services and access without constraints neither in the coverage area, the access method, or the instant of time. The solution suggested, in the near future, considers the collaboration of existing and emergent access technologies, with different characteristics (coverage area, quality of service, security, price, son on.), within a new integrated, ubiquitous, proactive communication environment. This new environment attempts to provide the access to the services, by means of dynamic configurations in order to allocate the best level of service at any time. This integration creates an important market to service providers for the delivery of services and contents. Nevertheless, several challenges have to be solved for the confirmation of the success of this new environment. Among the challenges of the environment we can mention the accounting and pricing of services. The requirements of the new services demand more efficient, flexible, pricing strategies and accounting mechanisms, and they must be adaptable to the changeable environment, satisfying the demands of the users and allowing service providers the maximization of their profits. This thesis has obtained an approach to support an accounting management subsystem based on QoS for a heterogeneous advanced mobile communication environment. This solution, named TCdS, is based on the policy model defined by IETF, and the specification of a distributed architecture composed by functional entities. The solution is applied within a multi-domain, multi-provider network environment. The architecture is designed to operate with the existent accounting protocols, allowing to TCdS to keep a compatibility with the current developments. Unlike other proposal published on the literature, which reflect the maximization of profits from the point of view of service provider or user, TCdS goes beyond that vision, considering the satisfaction of both service providers and users, valuing that, a user satisfied with a service is willing to use it in the future and to recommend the service to other users, producing an increase of profits for the service provider. This work defines mechanisms across algorithms and protocols that allow selecting the access network that fulfills the needs of the service, in order to provide users quality services, keep the service continuity in situations of user mobility. In addition, A strategy of assignment of adaptable price is defined, applied in situations where, for different factors, it was not possible to fulfill the expected quality of service level. These strategies will allow to keep or to recover the user satisfaction level as soon as possible. In order to evaluate the TCdS, several scenarios were developed and some factors that affect the quality of service (such as handover, authentication, type of traffic, etc) were analyzed. This allowed, by means of simulations, evaluating the performance of the TCdS subsystems and the proposed solutions. All evaluated issues demonstrate TCdS's efficiency by means of the provision of quality of services and the adjustment of tariffs applied to the services, improving the user's satisfaction, resulting in an increase of profits for the service providers.