Charging and Billing Schemes for PN Service Provisioning in Federated P2P Environments

Personal Networks (PNs) have already become one of the most promising ad hoc technologies to deliver personalized content and adaptive services to mobile users in overlay heterogeneous networking environments. PN service provisioning in such environments involves increased system complexity and intelligence in middleware design and smooth integration with the underlying access technologies. Additionally, successful PN service provisioning in federated environments involving several operators, content and service providers (SPs), will allow a highly profitable telecom business framework to be established, increasing unutilized network traffic and better exploiting available resources. Identification of the actual value sharing aspects between content and service provider in PN federations will allow several fair charging and billing schemes to be applied. This paper mainly addresses the most important aspects, issues and parameters to be considered by any candidate charging and billing mechanism for PN service provisioning in federated environments. The analysis is based on the identified actors and players and their roles in the PN business models. The process of content charging and service billing in a seamless service environment and particular in PNs is also described along with some potential schemes and mechanisms. The schemes are aligned with a newly configured regulation context in unified service provision. The work is part of the business modeling activity of the IST-MAGNET Beyond project under FP6[2].