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Provider selection and task allocation in telecommunications with QoS degradation policy

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Abstract

The information age that we are living in is characterized by exponentially increasing needs and corresponding means to access, transmit and use data in a variety of business settings. Fast growing demand, which is translated to market opportunities, has led to the emergence of many new and well-established firms entering into the telecommunications market, resulting in a crowded, highly competitive business environment with numerous providers and carriers offering a wide range of data services. Today’s firms use telecommunication networks in a variety of ways to carry out their daily communications such as video conferencing, voice over IP and other data-intensive transmissions. In this paper, we report on a study in which we investigate a cost optimization problem that a firm encounters when acquiring network bandwidth from a telecommunication market that consists of many backbone providers offering different combinations of pricing policies and quality of service (QoS) levels. After the acquisition of network resources (bandwidth), firms allocate these resources to their daily data transmissions (tasks) according to the QoS requirement of the tasks. In an optimal allocation scheme, it is generally presumed that each task has to be assigned to a network resource which is capable of providing an equal or higher level of QoS than required by the task. However, it is shown with the proposed heuristic approach (presented herein) that QoS degradations during the allocation of tasks can lead to more favorable outcomes, especially when certain cost penalty policies are applied to the reduction of QoS requirements.

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Acknowledgments

This research is partially supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) Career Development Program under Grant No. 106 K 263, and the NPRP award (NPRP 7-308-2-128) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of The Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the author(s).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Sabanci University, Tuzla, 34956, Istanbul, Turkey

    Nihat Kasap

  2. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Qatar University, 2713, Doha, Qatar

    Hasan Hüseyin Turan

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, University of Yalova, Merkez, 77100, Yalova, Turkey

    Hüseyin Savran

  4. Faculty of Management, Istanbul Technical University, Macka, 34367, Istanbul, Turkey

    Berna Tektas-Sivrikaya

  5. Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Dursun Delen

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  1. Nihat Kasap
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Correspondence to Dursun Delen.

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Kasap, N., Turan, H.H., Savran, H. et al. Provider selection and task allocation in telecommunications with QoS degradation policy. Ann Oper Res 263, 311–337 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-016-2213-5

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