Peter Reichl

• Full Professor, Head of Research Group "Cooperative Systems" at University of Vienna

This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of the mobile application cosy:sonics to explore technology reflection. To this end, three different approaches have been combined: (1) a cryptocurrency parody called EatCoin aiming at a direct experience of the useless resource consumption caused by Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work concept, (2)...

Complementing the current paradigm change from QoS to QoE, we address fundamental QoE charging issues for Internet services from an end user perspective. Here, key issues arise from gaps of different information contexts involved, which have to be managed when introducing a QoE product. Hence, this paper analyzes the double role of prices for quali...

In the summer of 2015, the president of the Austrian Federal Council has initiated a parliamentary initiative on “Digital Change and Politics”, in order to systematically investigate the political and legislative changes considered to be necessary for an optimal use of the Digital Revolution. Based on a comprehensive public online consultation proc...

research and technology orgaisations and impact on markets

While the current highly fragmented Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is characterized by an increasing number of platforms, their interoperability and collaboration is quite challenging to achieve, even more so due to numerous standardization initiatives. However, interoperability remains essential for future IoT deployments to facilitate the eme...

The rapidly increasing interest that the Internet of Things (IoT) has received both in academia and industry over the past few years has already resulted in a huge number of IoT platforms which, however, typically are conceived as individual vertically integrated systems without supporting inter-platform collaboration and interaction. In this paper...

Technology holds significant value for supporting visually impaired people in experiencing cultural heritage. Creating tactile adaptions of artifacts or paintings is a challenging task that comprises the need for a careful surface design, a good choice of material and interaction design sensible to the needs and abilities of the target group. This...

CoConUT is an Android app for collecting the mobile context as well as the frequency of interactions during mobile field studies (for example usability studies) using sensor data on the test device. For evaluation purposes the recorded user trial sessions can be visually explored. This facilitates an assessment of the user’s attention patterns and...

While for several decades research in telecommunications has been strongly focusing on engineering aspects, more recently a clear trend towards more interdisciplinary approaches has evolved and is about to result in a significant paradigm change. More specifically, the holistic characterization of systems of private and business customers, which in...

Since a couple of years, opera houses have started transmitting selected performances via live streaming over the Internet, in order to make them accessible to a broader audience. In this context, the "Salome Experience" project, carried out at the University of Vienna in collaboration with Vienna State Opera, investigates innovative approaches for...

We introduce ‘The interactive Audience Sensor Kit’ (TASK). This modular system of wirelessly networked sensors facilitates the augmentation of artistic performances, in particular, music events or visual art. It was conceived to enable low-level and low-cost audience interaction by offering a set of tracker-nodes to be arranged across the venue as...

Smartphone-based applications are increasingly being used to combat unhealthy habits resulting in obesity or reduced physical mobility. In turn, gamification has been identified as a useful tool to motivate individuals towards behavioural change. However, both health professionals and game developers are currently working on island solutions addres...

This chapter defines QoE as a user-centric concept of service quality. It provides a definition of QoE in various standardization fora, such as ITU, ETSI, and IETF.

Given increasing obesity rates, reduced physical activity and other unhealthy practices, mobile gamification-based health applications have gained momentum in motivating individuals towards behavioral change. The lack of corresponding frameworks enabling the efficient cooperation between health professionals and independent game developers has resu...

Today's cellular telecommunications markets require continuous monitoring and intervention by regulators in order to balance the interests of various stakeholders. In order to reduce the extent of regulatory involvements in the day-to-day business of cellular operators, the present paper proposes a "self-regulating" spectrum market regime named "so...

While the network quality research has been oscillating between user- and technology-driven viewpoints, the evolution of a utility-centric perspective is still a good way off. Today, not only insufficient data exists on network quality market figures, but also on the user's usage appreciation across service types and test ranges. Filling those rese...

While the modeling of QoE has made significant advances over the last couple of years, currently existing models still lack an integration of user behavior aspects and user context factors along with the consideration of appropriate temporal scales. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to present a comprehensive QoE and user behavior model providin...

This report provides an overview of the program, discussions and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 15022 "Quality of Experience: From Assessment to Application", which took place from 4 - 7 January 2015 at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics. The seminar and the challenges that were addressed have their roots in the earlier Dagstuhl Semina...

Confronted with soaring IP traffic demands and unsatisfying revenue prospects, charging and tariffing alternatives are about to regain significant attention in the telecommunications industry. While classical revenue optimization and customer perceptions, i.e., Quality of Experience (QoE), has been largely investigated by now, the understanding of...

This chapter discusses the relation between interactivity and QoE. In this context, a definition of interactivity comprising human-to-human interaction as well as human-to-machine interaction is presented, and a description of a possible instrumentation is given. In terms of quality formation, a mediation layer between quality influence factors and...

The current paradigm change towards Quality of Experience (QoE) does not only have conceptual and methodological consequences, but at the same time exhibits a profound impact on corresponding economic and business models, especially in the telecommunications market. This chapter deals with related issues from several layers of abstraction. We consi...

Purpose –The future development of the Internet is not only heavily depending on its technological evolution, but also on business sustainability for the interconnection ecosystem the Web relies on, where various players characterized by fairly different economic structures and interests are coexisting. Therefore, in this paper we propose a methodo...

Value Networks (VN) are gaining increasing importance for the analysis of highly complex business ecosystems. While most of the related work focuses on qualitative aspects, we are mainly interested in developing tools for a quantitative VN analysis. In this paper, we discuss the fundamental relationship between graph theory and VN analysis and outl...

While two decades of semantic web research so far have failed to fulfill the high initial promises and expectations, and the underlying quest for categorizing the world has led to increasing complexity and new levels of bureaucracy instead, in this paper we introduce a new concept for distributed reasoning aiming at simplicity, consistency and comp...

Within the current paradigm change from Quality-of-Service (QoS) towards Quality-of-Experience (QoE), the question of how to charge for QoE is widely neglected in the research community despite of its obvious importance. In this paper, we present and analyze a fixed point model which specifically reflects the double role of prices, i.e. as regulati...

Fueled by its recent success in provisioning on-site wireless Internet access, Wi-Fi is currently perceived as the best positioned technology for pervasive mobile macro network offloading. However, the broad transitions of multiple collocated operators towards this new paradigm may result in fierce competition for the common unlicensed spectrum at...

Examining monetary aspects related to QoE research, e.g. as bias, requires specifically defined empirical testing and data analysis routines. This paper presents an advanced setup for investigating the impact of purchasing behaviors in an interactive Video-on-demand scenario, and, based on lessons learned from previous and current experiments, prov...

The world of content provisioning over IP-based networks is currently undergoing a significant change, as Content Providers (CPs) have started to connect directly to Network Service Providers (NSPs) or even operate networks on their own. The resulting novel network architectures pose several fundamental economical challenges, for instance with resp...

Qualinet White Paper on Definitions of Quality of Experience Output from the fifth Qualinet meeting, Novi Sad, March 12, 2013

Utility functions, describing the value of a good or a resource from an end user’s point of view, are widely used as an important ingredient for all sorts of microeconomic models. In the context of resource allocation in communication networks, a logarithmic version of utility usually serves as the standard example due to its simplicity and mathema...

In contrast to traditional QoS-based charging, charges for QoE (Quality of Experience) play a double role both as part of the evaluation context and as counterpart of the user's willingness-to-pay for service quality. To further investigate this link between pricing and QoE, we combine some unexpected results from empirical quality perception exper...

While with traditional QoS-based charging the pricing structure mainly reflects the delivered QoS in order to regulate the demand, the role of service prices in a Quality of Experience (QoE) context is more complex. Amongst others, the charged price may in addition have a direct impact on the user's quality perception. In this paper, we analyze the...

The current evolution of mobile broadband is expected to significantly increase the demand for wireless access resources in the near future. In this article, three ways to escape this wireless access bottleneck trap are examined. The first option is technologically driven and corresponds to enhancing the spectral efficiency of access technology, th...

Studying the connection between QoE and QoS and its implications for network and content providers has yielded a couple of well-established experimental approaches. However, research in this field has mainly neglected economical aspects of user trials. This paper describes and evaluates an extended experimental setup to investigate willingness-to-p...

Over the last couple of years, the scope of Quality of Experience (QoE) research has been constantly extended, most recently to the field of Web QoE in the context of HTTP-based applications. In this paper, we address the question whether it is sufficient to reduce typical Web QoE assessment scenarios to the temporal aspects of waiting for task com...

Counteracting economic challenges in the network industry partially resulting from enormous traffic growth rates and the absence of successful Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms in practice, we propose a novel concept centering price and quality differentiation on customers' quality perceptions, i.e., Quality of Experience (QoE). By fundamentally...

Entailed from challenges in industries which are characterized by competitive economics of scale, like for instance network interconnection, the interest in Value Networks (VN) has significantly grown recently. While most of the related work is focussing on qualitative VN analysis, in this paper we describe an enhanced model of a VN quantification...

We analyze in this section game-theoretic models of competition between telecommunication networks providers in various contexts. This analysis helps to define and understand the operators' pricing and technology investments as well as the most efficient market rules by a regulator.

While the recent strong increase of interest in Quality of Experience both in industry and academia has managed to place the end user again into the center of service quality evaluation, corresponding economic implications have not received similar attention within the research community yet. Therefore, in this section we point out some of the key...

This section deals with the network neutrality debate to define the economic relationships between Internet access providers and (distant) content providers. We review the various definitions of what should be a neutral network, the outcome of all international consultations on the topic, and the arguments of network neutrality proponents and oppon...

Network users can choose among different security solutions to protect their data. Those solutions are offered by competing providers, with possibly different performance and price levels. In this paper, we model the interactions among users as a noncooperative game, with a negative externality coming from the fact that attackers target popular sys...

The rapidly growing bandwidth demand for mobile internet and mobile broadband applications is currently triggering the development of novel approaches to increase the capacity of the macro infrastructure of current mobile networks. Among the available options, increasing the spatial density of mobile sites is of specific interest, while at the same...

The 3GPP has chosen the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as signalling protocol for the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS); therefore, it is expected that telecom operators will widely use it for their systems. SIP relies on an underlying transport protocol, like, e.g., TCP, UDP or SCTP. In the case of UDP, SIP has to ensure itself that messages will b...

The 3GPP has chosen the Session Initiation Protocol as signalling protocol for the IP Multimedia Subsystem; therefore, it is expected that telecom operators will widely use it for their systems. SIP relies on an underlying transport protocol, like, e.g., TCP, UDP or SCTP. In the case of UDP, SIP has to ensure itself that messages will be reliably d...

The vision-based detection of hand gestures is one technological enabler for Natural User Interfaces which try to provide a natural and intuitive interaction with computers. In particular, mobile devices might benefit from such a less device-centric but more natural input possibility. In this paper, we introduce our ongoing work on the visual marke...

In order to cope with the expected future growth of mobile broadband traffic, network operators will be forced to dramatically increase their Radio Access Network (RAN) capacities. As neither the purchase of additional spectrum nor the deployment of new radio technologies will be able to solve this problem in the long run, we focus on a strategy fo...

This report defines the ETICS architecture which is the high level representation of main building blocks to establish assured-quality network connectivity across different networks owned by different providers. This end-to-end inter carrier connectivity is aimed to be established in a dynamic and automated way, whils t allowing the various provid...

Caused by the non-linearity of some industries such as networking interconnection, the deep understanding of Value Networks has grown in importance. While related works such as Value Network Analysis have been subject to the available qualitative mechanisms, this papers aims at quantifying actor dependencies within Value Networks. To this end, a se...

Abstract—The identification of viable scenarios for analyzing and simulating future network services is considered a key requirement for identifying their potential economic success. In this paper, we describe a requirements classification concept for interconnection services with assured service quality (ASQ) which allows to objectively describe I...

Security is one of the main concerns in current telecommunication networks: the service providers and individual users have to protect themselves against attacks, and to this end a careful analysis of their optimal strategies is of essential importance. Indeed, attackers and defenders are typically agents trying strategically to design the most imp...

This paper describes the design and implementation of the "Semantic Generator" engine, which is used to trans-form and generate data from semantic formats, i.e., RDF, OWL or N3, to semantic and non-semantic formats, i.e., RDF/XML or text. The proposed lightweight approach maxi-mizes the reuse of existing, widespread technologies while also allowing...

Providing Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) in connection with media data like audio or video is of key importance for the evolution of future packet-based networks. Especially in telecommunications, the subjective service quality as perceived by the end user depends amongst other parameters on the setup success rate as well...

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a transport protocol which delivers packets strictly in order. For signaling protocols which send multiple independent requests within one single TCP session, the loss of a TCP packet may therefore lead to increased delay for later signaling requests. This phenomenon is known as Head-of-Line Blocking (HoLB...

Utility functions, describing the value of a good or a resource from an end user's point of view, are widely used as an important ingredient for all sorts of microeconomic models. In the context of resource allocation in communication networks, a logarithmic form of utility usually serves as the standard example due to its simplicity and mathematic...

The recent tremendous growth of mobile broadband traffic demand forces mobile operators to find ways for offloading their macro-infrastructure. This can be achieved by a combination of two concepts, i.e., introducing/deploying a finer grid of base-stations (femto-cells) together with increasing the share of traffic volume that is handled by communi...

Novel mobile cellular access network technologies like Long Term Evolution (LTE) promise capacities exceeding the ones of existing 3G networks by at least one order of magnitude. This evolution will enable the deployment of services which, due to their capacity requirements, are currently restricted to fixed access networks. On the other hand, pack...

The Weber-Fechner Law (WFL) is an important principle in psychophysics which describes the relationship be- tween the magnitude of a physical stimulus and its perceived intensity. With the sensory system of the human body, in many cases this dependency turns out to be of logarithmic nature. Re- cent quantitative QoE research shows that in several d...

Providing Quality of Service (QoS) differentiation in future IP-based networks is closely linked to the concurrent implementation of appropriate pricing and charging mechanisms. Thus, in recent years, a broad range of QoS-based charging mechanisms have been proposed, ranging from Paris Metro Pricing and effective bandwidth pricing to the Cumulus Pr...

Interactive video services, like video telephony, so-cial TV or on-line gaming, are about to become a significant part of the service portfolio for telecommunication service providers. As the future commercial success of these services will depend es-sentially on their end-to-end quality as perceived by the end user, appropriate Quality-of-Experien...

Service quality and user-perceived experience has been a networking research topic for many years. Whereas most related work concentrates on the quality of media, only very few papers, however, discuss the performance of the signaling for those media. This paper addresses the performance of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) which is very popula...

Today’s mobile phones are increasingly used as mediators between the real world and georeferenced digital information. However, common 2D maps as the most often applied visualization method are bearing inherent limitations when presenting a vast amount of data on a small screen. Therefore, in this paper, we propose ‘ambient tag clouds’ as an abstra...

The ns-2 network simulator is one of the most widely used packet network simulators. Since version 2.1b9, it uses the MRG32k3a random number generator (RNG) proposed by L’Ecuyer, replacing the previous minimal standard multiplicative linear congruential generator by Park and Miller to remedy the problems of sensitivity to seeds and short-period len...

With the imminent roll-out of the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), IMS-specific security threats and corresponding counter-mechanisms are gaining increasing attention. One of the most promising recent intrusion detection approaches dealing with unforeseen anomalies caused by flooding attacks is based on a specific metric for the distance between...

The accurateness of round-trip- and one way delay measurements for 2G and 3G networks rely to a much larger extent on employing a sound methodological framework than this is the case for other types of networks. Typical mobile access networks differ significantly from core networks, most prominently with respect to delay. In this paper we present p...

Current research in the area of computer mediated communication focuses on user expectations and their experience of the communication systems fidelity. The majority of approaches assessing the user experience is based on trying to map the technical quality parameters of the system onto a certain conversational quality experienced by the user. Such...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Internet Charging and QoS Technologies, ICQT 2009, held in Aachen, Germany, in May 2009 collocated with the IFIP Networking 2009 conference. The 9 revised full papers presented together with the extended abstract of a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and select...

In this paper, we describe a novel algorithm for dynamic traffic engineering in the Internet called Adaptive Multi-Path routing (AMP). The main objective of AMP is to distribute load within a network domain in a continuous manner by offloading congested links in real-time. The algorithm’s recursive signaling structure represents one of our central...

Using mobile devices for exploring and interacting with the user's physical environment is among the most promising candidates for commercially successful future telecommunication services and applications. This trend is confirmed by the rollout of latest mobile phones equipped with advanced navigation features like built-in GPS receivers, digital...

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is one promising candidate for merging currently deployed circuit-switched and packet-switched voice and data networks into a service-based All-IP architecture. One requirement common to all of these Next Generation Network (NGN) architectures is seamless user mobility – a mandatory feature in order to match with t...

Quality of Service impairments in wireless and wired access networks for IP-based next generation networks (NGNs) differ fundamentally from the ones which we typically encounter in core networks. Examples include but are not limited to high delay, low bandwidth, and high jitter. Even though most NGN architectures claim to be access-agnostic, applic...

Evaluating the user satisfaction with Next Generation Network applications requires, amongst others, to carefully study the impact of various access networks with differing performance characteristics. This paper presents the concept and implementation of a network emulator for IP-based packet-switched wired and wireless access technologies based o...

The telecommunications sector and the Internet section of Internet Service Providers (ISP) have become a dynamic key area for the economic development of industrialized nations in the world. It is in constant evolution. Because of intense competition, telecommunications companies and ISPs are forced to diversify their offers and thus to propose an...

This paper explores the design space of Smart Horizons - mobile applications offering to look at virtual representations of the user"s visible surroundings. We conducted an outdoor field study with a fully implemented spatially aware restaurant finder service, in which participants accessed points of interest (POI) virtually attached to nearby buil...

One aspect highly neglected so far in Next Generation Net- works development is that their access-agnostic service architecture re- quires NGN services to provide adequate user perception for a broad range of underlying access network technologies. Automated service test- ing for a wide variety of access technologies will therefore become indis- pe...

1 Overview and Objectives This Dagstuhl Seminar on "Telecommunication Eco-nomics" was organized to discuss and develop partially a strategic research outline among key people in order to enhance the competence in the field of telecommunica-tion economics and respective network management tasks for integrated Internet and telecommunication networks....

Telecommunications research can no longer be considered to be pure communications engineering. The convergence of fixed-line and mobile telephony with the Internet together with the rise of novel technologies for rapid service creation has made economic efficiency and user acceptance/usability to crucial factors for the success of the telecommunica...

Abstract This description and evaluation document,presents an overview of the experiences,gained and evaluations performed with respect to the charging and accounting extensions designed, implemented, and made for the Reservation Protocol RSVP. It provides different aspects,of an answer,to the question: Does RSVP-based charging result in a suitable...

Over the past years, telecommunications as a research area has grown far beyond pure communications engineering and today covers the entire economic value chain up to the end customer. As a consequence, “Internet Economics” has been established as a new and promising research area of its own, aiming at a fresh perspective on familiar problems. The...

The ns-2 network simulator is one of the most widely used packet network simulators. In version 2.1b9 its old random number generator was replaced by an implementation of MRG32k3a to fix sensitivity to seeds. Due to bad documentation and re-use of old scripts many people still use the old API functions to explicitly set seeds. Unfortunately, this c...

Future all-IP networks will support a variety of high-value IP-based services including the upcoming integration of today's non-IP services offered by mobile telecommunication providers. Besides postpaid charging, prepaid charging will play an important role in all-IP environments due to the financial control of providers and customers, thus determ...

The convergence of future fixed and wireless networking more and more requires solutions for transporting realtime application data to IP enabled mobile devices and mobile networks. Even if the general Mobile IPv6 protocol performs sufficient in macro environments with non-realtime requirements, seamless mobility demands some more enhanced protocol...

In this paper, we present a comprehensive algorithmic framework for discrete-time flow-level simulation of data networks. We fir st provide a simple al- gorithm based upon iterative equations useful for the simulation of networks with static traffic demands, and we show how to determine packet lo ss and throughput rates using a simple example netwo...

This paper presents two empirical investigations of future applications of mobile spatial interaction, i.e. the use of mobile phones as pointers to the real world. In situated interviews and a photo diary study, real-world objects of interest for referencing services were identified. Furthermore, envisioned services, their attractiveness and releva...