Call For Papers

Scope

Demand for data in both wired and wireless broadband networks is doubling every year, inducing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to use pricing both as a congestion management tool and a revenue generation model.  This changing landscape is evidenced by the elimination of flat-rate plans in favor of $10/GB usage based fees in the US and various other countries in Asia and Europe. More recently, new monetization approaches are taking off, such as the Sponsored Content plans from AT&T and other ISPs in Asia, Africa, and South America. Consequently, Smart Data Pricing (SDP) is now playing a major role in the future of mobile, broadband, and content. The 6th workshop on SDP will provide an interdisciplinary platform for researchers in engineering, economics, and business schools to exchange novel ideas that jointly address the challenges and opportunities presented by the recent explosive growth in demand for broadband data.
 
SDP can refer to many types of pricing plans for Internet data transmission, with the goal of creating less congestion, better quality-of-experience for users, lower CapEx/OpEx, higher revenue/profit margins, less churn, and more usage and revenue for content/app providers. It requires developing pricing models that capture the interplay between technical and economic factors, interfaces among network providers and content/app providers, field trials, and a combination of smart ideas, smart execution, and smart policy. We welcome papers that contain any or all of these elements.
 
In addition to papers on the economics of Internet data transmission, we welcome papers that consider related areas, e.g., pricing in the Internet-of-Things, which will likely be a major component on 5G wireless networks, as well as the pricing of smart grids, cloud resources, and the sharing economy. We expect that the workshop will benefit from bringing together not only the attendees’ different views on pricing, but also technical papers on a variety of application domains.
 
The 1st workshop on SDP was held on July 30-31, 2012, in Princeton, USA, and the 2nd-5th workshops were co-located with IEEE INFOCOM 2013-2016. The SDP workshops have a history of nurturing multidisciplinary research by bringing together academics and practitioners from top international Universities, research labs (like Microsoft Research, AT&T Labs, ACS/Telcordia, INRIA), service providers (like AT&T, Comcast, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom), hardware vendors (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Microsoft, Cisco), and representatives from the US FCC and the National Exchange Carrier Association.
 
All accepted papers will be considered for the Bell Labs Best Paper Award.


Topics

We solicit contributions describing analyses of state-of-the-art pricing mechanisms, results of ongoing research, open issues, trends, pricing-related signaling protocols, net-neutrality related policy implications, standardization activities, and new ideas in smart pricing and economic models that can help alleviate network congestion. Topics of particular interest to SDP 2017 include, but are not limited to:

  • Theories, models, and analyses of access pricing
  • Use of incentives and economic mechanisms to alleviate network congestion
  • Economics of WiFi offloading, femtocells, heterogeneous networks
  • Empirical studies of user behavior in response to price incentives
  • Novel system implementation, deployment, or field trials of smart pricing
  • Spectrum monetization
  • Pricing challenges for fifth generation (5G) wireless networks and the Internet of Things
  • Incentives and pricing in the sharing economy
  • Two-sided pricing, billing, and sponsored content
  • Network neutrality and regulatory aspects of pricing policies
  • Pricing of smart grids, cloud computing, etc.
  • Hardware and software support for enabling smarter pricing practices
  • Security and privacy issues in smart pricing
  • Human-computer interaction aspects of pricing practices
  • Activities on standardization of signaling protocols for smart pricing

Important Dates 
 
Full Paper Submission Deadline: January 10, 2017 January 24, 2017
Author Notification: February 22, 2017
Camera-ready paper due: March 12, 2017