Social Carrier Recommendation for Selecting Services in Electronic Telecommunication Markets: A Preliminary Report

The proliferation of telecommunication services and the need to manage quality of service on an end-to-end basis require an approach for automatically selecting services that provide sufficient quality of service at minimal cost. An agent-based approach is appropriate for such a purpose. For this reason, this paper presents a social carrier recommendation method, which is an essential component of application level end-to-end quality of service management as well as a way to make the final step towards electronic telecommunication markets. For electronic telecommunication markets, the proposed approach provides a consumer-based evaluation of services as well as "rational" user agents that select services and carriers based on needs, offered prices, and ratings. Therefore, this approach complements existing market mechanisms that either provide means to buy services or intend to improve sales and customer service of carriers.

ICSI Technical Report TR-97-033

Technical Report