Business Aspects of Advertising and Discovery Concepts in Ambient Networks

This paper presents initial findings on how ambient networks technology will enable new ways to establish and manage access and service provisioning from a business perspective. The concepts of network composition and multi-radio multi-operator wireless access provide the framework for network advertising and discovery, which are essential first steps for allowing "any" user to be able to connect to "any" network. Technology support for different options of advertising are described followed by a discussion of the business related aspects including: i) payment schemes, ii) dynamic pricing, iii) use of identifiers for "frequent users", iv) use of public or "private" directories of offers and v) possibilities with alliances between providers. Finally, results of a case study on dynamic pricing are presented. The conclusion is that the proposed concepts of advertising and discovery indicate a very large potential for enabling a competitive market for both access and service provisioning including support for establishment of agreements on the fly