A technique to support dynamic pricing strategy for differentiated cellular mobile services

摘要

With the advent of a multi-operator regime in the sector of cellular mobile services, users became sensitive to the quality of service (QoS), and, as a result service providers started offering differentiated services. Each operator shall ensure the promised QoS to every subscriber even during busy hours of a day when the network operates at the maximum load. During off-peak hours the load on the network decreases. As a result, the network designed to meet the QoS requirement during busy hours of a day leaves a large amount idle resource during off-peak hours of the day. In this scenario, a service provider faces the problem of maximizing revenue while satisfying resource and QoS constraints. A dynamic differentiated pricing strategy (DDPS) for the cellular mobile service is a solution to the above problem. In this paper, we have proposed a DDPS which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in the literature. We have compared the performance of our proposed solution with the static differentiated pricing strategies (SDPSs) with respect to revenue earned and average network resource utilization. The experimental results show that our proposed solution provides a substantial improvement over the SDPSs.