The success of the Internet is diminished by the fact that there are no successful models of pricing and its use to both provide incentives, and be used as control mechanisms. Institutional end-users and network providers are typically billed flat-rate except that excess load is billed based on usage during overload/congested periods. Such crude pricing mechanisms are not sufficiently responsive to the rapidly changing costs of supply and the extremely complex dynamics and large scale user demand. Furthermore, little incentive is provided for users to appropriately employ emerging differential classes of service and provisioned circuits. The very distributed nature of the Internet makes deployment of pricing and billing mechanism challenging.

There has been progress on this issue lately via the use of game theoretic and otpimization theory. However, this has primarily been motivated by congestion control or resource allocation and there is no real "network economics" that has emerged which ties in pricing concepts together with control and incentives.

The success of the future Internet is going to rest on providing the proper economic or business model. Hence, the time is ripe to develop a cogent and useful framework to address the issues of economics, pricing, and network management. This issue aims at providing a focused forum for papers that addresses the core issues outlined above.

We are soliciting papers on the following topics:

• User/application utility modeling: individual end-users, institutional end-users, network providers, elasticity
• Network utility modeling: social welfare, revenue maximization
• Pricing incentives for TCP, differentiated services, MPLS
• Pricing mechanism-design and analysis: auctions, tatonnement, policy iteration, distributed dual algorithms, hybrid pricing systems, distributed bandwidth broker mechanisms
• Pricing mechanisms for medium access and routing in multihop wireless networks, DSL, and WiFi access pricing
• Network dynamics modeling and analysis: games, composite contract networks, distributed/hierarchical frameworks
• Distributed biling, cost-recovery mechanisms, user-network interfacing, peering
• Distributed oversight and other regulation mechansims to prevent price-fixing, collusion
• Empirical market studies
• Bandwidth options and other derivatives

Prospective authors should follow the IEEE J-SAC manuscript format described in the Information for Authors. Manuscripts submitted for this issue should not be under consideration by any other journal. All papers should be submitted in pdf format. To submit your paper 1) go to http://edas.info, 2) establish an account, 3) receive an email from edas with your password, 4) login to the edas system, 5) select the J-SAC issue, 6) click on view, 7) click on submit paper and follow the instructions. The following timetable shall apply: