Analysis of benefits of operator cooperation using end-user and operator performance metrics

According to the Ambient Networks vision `any´ user will be able to connect to `any´ network at `any´ time. This requires some new technical innovations like new ways to advertise networks and services, new ways to perform access and service provider selection as well as new ways to form the network side cooperation’s between business players. In the paper, we investigate how operators and users can benefit from the flexibility in selection among networks and providers. Network Composition is one of the Ambient Networks concepts and it provides a set of tools for dynamical establishment of cooperation between network and service providers. This means that the business landscape is likely to go through some changes as well. The business dynamics will increase with a multitude of service and network providers and with many forms of cooperation. Flexible roaming between networks will be a key characteristic of access and service provisioning. The difference between `home´ and `visited´ network is getting minimal, when users are able to freely choose their accesses and the `home operator´ is seen more like an entity taking care of billing and other subscription related support services. The impacts of operator’s cooperation are analyzed in a multi-access scenario where operators have partially overlapping network deployments. In order to model and measure the end user and operator satisfaction, we introduce two new performance metrics; the User Satisfaction Index and the Operator Satisfaction Index. These indexes are used in our simulation experiment. The results indicate both technical and non-technical gains with the network cooperation.

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