Abstract

The Internet, mobile telephony and portable computers let today’s user meet novel applications provided by the service developers, who are motivated by the popular customer trends in technology. However, the supply-demand chain observed in telecommunications causes the complexity of both the user devices as well as the network to increase. The complexity is caused by the need to support quality of service, security and mobility for the new services throughout the heterogeneous communication network. These problems slow down the application development process significantly and cause the user demand not to be met in time. We believe that a new look at the network is necessary in order to address these issues. This article presents this new look, which we term network economy. It is a service-centric approach to next generation mobile networks, whereby the network is redefined as a collection of diverse resources. The aim of network economy is to optimise the allocation of these resources such that network efficiency is maximised. In order to achieve this objective, the intelligence level of the network is increased by decision engines, which continuously collect information from the network, classify and store it in a repository to be queried by their peers. The approach is accompanied by context-aware, self-organising user devices. Network economy provides a network-wide infrastructure to benefit users, service developers as well as network operators.