Service outsourcing to support virtual home environments (VHE)

In a virtual home environment (VHE), mobile users may access all services available on their home network, in the same manner and with the same level of service performance. Interaction between users, their home networks and candidate visited networks should be planned for service discovery, and QoS and price negotiation. A further aspect for consideration is the use of networks owned by unaffiliated operators that are candidates for facilitating the VHE, when the affiliated visited does not support the requested service. In this paper we explore VHE aspects and scenarios with the aim of introducing service outsourcing. We extend our earlier work on service outsourcing to VHE where services are outsourced to a candidate network if the custodian visited network cannot meet critical VHE requirements for a user. Through numerical analysis we show that if agreed roaming prices are charged for services delivered on an unaffiliated candidate network wider service usage will occur in VHEs.