SDP 2015 - Fourth IEEE Workshop on Smart Data Pricing

Demand for data in both wired and wireless broadband networks are almost 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 Asian telcos, and new peering agreements between content provider and service providers are being formed. Consequently, Smart Data Pricing (SDP) is now playing a major role in the future of mobile, broadband, and content distribution networks. SDP can refer to (a) time/location/app/congestion dependent dynamic pricing, (b) usage based pricing with throttling/booster, (c) WiFi offloading/proactive caching, (d) two-sided pricing/reverse billing/sponsored content, (e) quota-aware content distribution, (f) shared data pricing, and any combination or extensions of the above. SDP can help create happier consumers and enterprise users, less congestion, and better Quality of Experience, lower CapEx/OpEx, higher revenue/profit margin, less churn, more consumption and ad revenue to content/app providers. But it also 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.
The 4th Workshop on Smart Data Pricing (SDP), to be held on April 27, 2015, as a part of IEEE INFOCOM in Hong Kong, solicits 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 2015 include, but 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
Challenges in monetization of spectrum and emerging pricing trends
Two-sided pricing, reverse billing, and sponsored content
Network neutrality and regulatory aspects of pricing policies
Economic and pricing issues in smart grids, cloud computing, etc.
Hardware and software support for enabling smarter pricing practices
Security and privacy issues in smart pricing
Impact of pricing and policies on the Digital Divide
Human-computer interaction aspects of pricing practices
Activities on standardization of signaling protocols for smart pricing