DYNAMIC PRICING WITH “ALTERNATIVES” FOR DATA SERVICES INMOBILE NETWORKS

摘要

Capacity of wireless data services offered by GPRS andEDGE is critically limited and cannot keep up with therising demand. The technical approaches taken to alleviatethe problem are not sufficient to encounter a completerange of incoming traffic scenarios. In this paper, we de-fine and study analytically a performance model for wirelessdata services that combines the effect of pricing incentiveas an additional strategy for encouraging a more effi-cient usage of limited network resources. We propose thenovel pricing scheme, namely dynamic pricing with “Alternatives”,that not only provides the incentive for usersto utilize network resource in the way that conforms to thenetwork traffic condition but also potentially gains moreuser satisfaction by offering pricing preference. The performanceresults verify that the new pricing scheme significantlyimproves the system performance and potentiallyyields users’ satisfaction.