Economical aspects of heterogeneous networks: when money, quality, and context matter

The high usage of multimedia content in daily activities has put strains on the network operators as the transmitted content can lead to network congestion. In an effort to control and reduce the traffic, network operators have capped their billing plans. A capped billing plan may require the user to pay extra money when exceeding the quota, and this can result in undesirably high bills for the mobile users. A solution that has been shown to reduce the size of transmitted data and also addresses user needs in terms of billing cost was presented in Molnar and Muntean (2013a). This solution involves personalising the multimedia content based on the user attitude towards risk. It makes use of a model that assesses the user attitude towards risk by considering the user age, gender, and risk attitude self-assessment. The research presented in this chapter adds to the state of the art by presenting an improvement to the user risk attitude model (Molnar & Muntean, 2012) that takes into account the user context (e.g. whether the user uses the roaming service or not, the current data consumption) as well as the user input. The improved model may be used to provide a more accurate trade-off: quality vs. price (Molnar & Muntean, 2013a) and this leads to an increase in user satisfaction and better service quality.