Management of Internet Services by Economic Means

ABSTRACT Since business and commercial requirements determine the driving force for Internet service offerings, Quality-of-Service (QoS) and applications characteristics have to be taken into consideration for a managed service delivery in the Internet next to the economic dimension of charging those. Economic management principles are applied in a number of traditional markets, but only recently have gained increasing interest in the control of Internet services and traffic with respect to economic efficiency, user acceptability, and technical feasibility. This paper addresses these three main areas of current research in a wholistic approach and identifies open technical problems, which require further work.