Multi-attribute Auction Model for Agent-Based Content Trading in Telecom Markets

The advent of the Internet and the development of the Next Generation Network (NGN) have enabled the development of value added services (VAS), while operators’ investments in licenses and their desire to stay competitive on the market have triggered the development. When forming VAS, special attention needs to be paid to the purchase of resources (e.g., transport capacity and content) needed for the service creation. As the number of participants on the telecom market increases, the need for automation of transactions carried between them arises. In this paper, we identify stakeholders on the telecom content e-market and propose an appropriate model which captures their transactions. Since content is not a commodity we propose a multi-attribute auction model for content trading which prevents sellers from manipulating the auction outcome by offering unnecessarily high values of some (often less important) attributes in order to compensate for unreasonably low values of other (more important) ones. A multi-agent system which uses the multi-attribute auction model as a negotiation protocol is presented and an illustrative example of content trading in telecom markets is provided.