Cost/commitment tradeoffs in UMTS networks using the digital marketplace

UMTS can support various applications that possess a wide range of quality of service (QoS) requirements. In previous work, the concept of commitment was introduced whereby differing levels of guarantee can be given to the user for the provision of this QoS. This concept of commitment can also be used in bandwidth trading systems. This paper considers the trade-off between different commitment levels and the cost of providing them for different UMTS air interfaces, particularly EDGE and TDD. It defines a resource metric estimator (RME) and shows how this can be interfaced with higher layer functions such as a digital marketplace resulting in a completely managed system capable of providing controlled QoS. This fulfils the promise of UMTS to provide access to information to users when, where and how they desire.