Quality‐based charging solutions for wireless multimedia services

The evolution of mobile telecommunication networks and access bandwidth has enabled operators to deliver IPTV services for mobile customers; however, the existing mobile charging solutions are not effectively addressing the billing requirements of multimedia streams. This paper develops a quality‐based charging solution for 3GPP wireless networks with the aim of providing a fair pricing solution for multimedia services. An appropriate business model is selected and a streaming proxy‐based charging architecture is developed based on the quality of the multimedia service. The proposed algorithms are theoretically evaluated by the derivation of the formulas of the distribution and the expected value of the price discount. A testbed is built and the findings are evaluated and compared with traditional charging functions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.