Abstract
For a variety of commodities wholesale markets are an integral part of the sales and distribution process. We deal with the question whether wholesale markets for network resources have the potential to achieve market segmentation and increased customisation by facilitating scalable provision of services with deterministic performance guarantees. The technical benefit of segmenting the large scale problem of QoS provision in a flat hierarchy into multiple scalable problems in an n-tier hierarchy is discussed as well as the resulting implications on inter-provider relationships. We identify arbitrage opportunities due to different minimum batch sizes of service contracts between wholesale entities and due to cost of supporting processes which are proportional to the number of differentiated service classes. The equilibrium state of a bargaining game in a multi-layered wholesale market scenario with a variety of virtual network structures exploiting such arbitrage opportunities can be considered Pareto-optimal in the sense that no business entity can improve its situation by deviating from the strategy of participating in a network resource trading scheme. Moreover we analyse cost accounting schemes with focus on their applicability in profit assessment of individual services. Profitability assessment provides essential information for the decision for which services resources need to be acquired or released. A modified version of multi-stage contribution margin accounting is selected as most promising candidate. The inherent advantages of this costing scheme are elaborated by means of of a comparison with legacy contribution margin accounting and with a fully distributed cost scheme.
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Recker, S. Multilayered Wholesale Resource Trading to Foster Service Diversity in Packet-Switching Networks. Telecommunication Systems 27, 181–205 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:TELS.0000041008.16406.5a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:TELS.0000041008.16406.5a