Network Economics and Utility Maximization

Dear Colleagues,

With the rise of 5G communications and the evolution of the Internet of Things era, mobile communications and computing solutions are tightly coupled and jointly studied with economic considerations. Any technology choice, wireless protocol selection, network architecture proposal, and virtualization approach should be made based on the understanding of the economic implications and the potential costs and benefits, both from the provider and the end-user perspective. Various network economics-based solutions have been identified in the literature and have already been applied in real-communication networking scenarios, as well as other interdependent systems. Usage-based pricing, inventive mechanisms, auction mechanisms, smart data pricing, and service providers’ reputation and trust models are only some indicative examples. The utmost goals of the network economics mechanisms are to improve resource management and decision-making processes, provide better services to the end-users via exploiting the available system resources, improve the fairness among the end-users, support the free-market operation among the service providers, enhance the available bandwidth usage, and provide energy-efficient solutions.

The concept of network economics is also tightly coupled with the Network Utility Maximization (NUM) theory, which aims to improve the end-users’ and the providers’ benefits from co-existing in the network by maximizing their perceived utility. Centralized methods have been identified as potential solutions, based on optimization techniques (convex and non-convex optimization), where the decision-making process lies on a centralized entity that has the global view of the network, such as software-defined networking (SDN). Decentralized methods have also been proposed based on game theory, reinforcement learning, and deep learning approaches, allowing the end-users to make optimal decisions about their strategies in the network based on limited information exchange.

Traffic on the Internet and wireless networks is continuously rising, with multimedia data being the dominant source. The explosive growth of ultra-high definition video services and bandwidth-expensive applications, create interesting challenges in content delivery networks (CDN), and storage/cloud costs. In this setting, the emerging tradeoffs between the quality of experience (QoE) and associated costs, for network, internet service, and cloud computing providers, motivate economic resource utilization approaches, and revenue management for all involved actors and players.

This Special Issue aims to present the advances in the research on network economics and utility maximization. We seek submissions that demonstrate how network economics and utility maximization can solve current problems in 5G networks and beyond, as well as challenges that arise in the Internet of Things era and emerging variations of the cloud computing paradigm. Topics of interest are any aspects of network economics and utility maximization, including but not limited to the following:

• Energy-efficient networks and services
• Foundations for economic multimedia communication
• Network slicing design and optimization in 5G networks
• Economic modeling of multimedia transmission over heterogeneous networks
• Software-defined networking (SDN) architectures and networks
• Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV)
• Future of IoT networks and cloud computing
• Network economics for safe and smart cities
• Network economics for content distribution networks (CDNs)
• Metrics and models for quality of experience (QoE)
• Smart data pricing
• Quality of service in wireless and mobile networks
• Cognitive network architectures
• Smart grids communications and demand response techniques
• Machine-learning and artificial intelligence for traffic/QoE management
• Advanced content caching and dissemination techniques
• Blockchain-based decentralization schemes for IoT
• Mobile edge and fog computing systems
• Vehicular cloud networks
• Security, reliability, and trust in networks
• Crowdsensing and crowdsourcing systems
• Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data applications
• IoT platforms, integration, and services
• Cyber-physical systems interacting with 5G networks and IoT

Dr. Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou
Prof. Dr. Symeon Papavassiliou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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