  From the viewpoint of service operators the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for
developing a communication service comprises from two parts; CAPital
EXpenditure (CAPEX) and OPerational EXpenditure (OPEX). These two types of
costs are interrelated and affect any service provider's deployment strategy.
In many traditional methods, selection of critical elements of a new service is
performed in a heuristic manner aimed at reducing only the OPEX part of the TCO
which is not necessarily optimal. Furthermore, exact cost modeling for such
services is not always possible and contains some uncertainties. In the current
work, after cost modeling of each video streaming element by capturing the
effect of the model uncertainties, the TCO optimization problem for video
streaming over IP networks is formulated as a stochastic optimization problem.
The solution of the proposed optimization problem can cope with the cost
modeling uncertainties and track the dynamism in the TCO and lead to a
time-varying optimal solution. Numerical analysis results verify the developed
method.
