Services in telecommunication networks depend on distributed communication, computation, storage, and sensing resources. These resources are owned, operated, and used by different stakeholders. The stakeholders have their own preferences concerning technical or economic attributes associated with investing in, developing, deploying, and using telecommunication technologies. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stakeholder modeling framework for the techno-economic analysis of telecommunication networks considering the preferences of each stakeholder. To analyze autonomous decisions made by each stakeholder, we first present how to identify stakeholders, their utility functions, and how to elicit and integrate their preferences into their utility functions. Furthermore, we highlight important aspects regarding the interactions between stakeholders, such as conflicts of interests, information exchange and information asymmetries, and mutually beneficial interdependencies. Finally, we discuss how to design algorithms to solve multi-stakeholder problems in a given scenario and how to evaluate the results. Using concrete examples from edge computing, mobile crowdsensing, and device-to-device data forwarding, we show three applications of the proposed techno-economic multi-stakeholder modeling framework.
IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 61,Issue 2, pp. 52–56,
2023
