Scope

Internet communications and their commercial use has shown a large demand on charging support. While differentiated services, grid-based services, and QoS-guaranteed services enable a huge variety of prosperous business models, the need for viable models and pricing schemes is urgent. The resulting combination of technical and economic perspectives drives many relevant research topics for application developers, business architects, network providers, service providers, and customers. Especially the identification of novel service charging solutions, the investigation and evaluation of their technical feasibility, and the consolidation of technical and economic mechanisms for enabling a fast, guaranteed, and efficient charging of services is of fundamental importance for the future evolution of the Internet, and as such the central focus of the international ICQT workshop series.

ICQT’06 is the fifth event in this series, following the highly successful workshops ICQT 01 in Vienna (Austria), ICQT 02 in Zurich (Switzerland), ICQT 03 in Munich (Germany), and ICQT 04 in Barcelona (Spain).

The focus of this year’s workshop is on the close relation between economics and technologies in support of charging, pricing for Quality-of-Service (QoS), and business modeling.

Therefore, authors are invited to submit work on issues related to, but not limited by, the following list of topics:

Network economics and economic models for the Internet
Internet pricing, tariffing, and billing
Application service provider models
Charging technologies for next generation networks
Monitoring, measuring, and accounting
ISP cost and business models
Service charging models, e.g., grids and web services
Charging for QoS, services, and content
Interdomain pricing approaches
Pricing mobile and wireless services
Management of Service Level Agreements
Security mechanisms for charging

Papers and Submissions

Papers are solicited as full papers (in English), of no more than 12 single-spaced pages, each of which will be subject to a full review process. Submissions should already follow the author guidelines as specified below and must include: title, authors, affiliations, 100-word abstract, and a list of at most five keywords. The corresponding author should be identified clearly, including name, position, mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address. An electronic, PDF-based submission of papers is mandatory.

The conference proceedings are planned to be published as hard-copy and electronically by Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Series and will be available during the event. In preparing their manuscript, authors are obliged to follow the LNCS guidelines (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) strictly and without exception, including the 12 page limit.

To submit your paper, go to the URL https://mir.ftw.at/subm/icqt06

Best student paper award

There will be a best student paper award sponsored by the Fondation Metivier.

For further submission instructions contact icqt06@ftw.at.

Important Dates

Deadline for submissions: January 23, 2006. Paper has to be registered on January, 15.
Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2006.
Camera ready version: April 25, 2006.
Workshop date: June 27, 2006.

General Information

The workshop will be organized on the second day of the two ACM Sigmetrics and IFIP Performance conferences, especially as a full day on June 27, 2006.