IEICE Trans - Multi-Stage Non-cooperative Game for Pricing and Connection Admission Control in Wireless Local Area Networks

Multi-Stage Non-cooperative Game for Pricing and Connection Admission Control in Wireless Local Area Networks

Bo GU  Kyoko YAMORI  Sugang XU  Yoshiaki TANAKA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E96-B    No.7    pp.1986-1996
Publication Date: 2013/07/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E96.B.1986
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Terrestrial Wireless Communication/Broadcasting Technologies
Keyword:
connection admission control,  pricing,  game theory,  equilibrium,  PBE,

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Summary:
This paper focuses on learning the economic behaviour of the access point (AP) and users in wireless local area networks (WLANs), and using a game theoretic approach to analyze the interactions among them. Recent studies have shown that the AP would adopt a simple, yet optimal, fixed rate pricing strategy when the AP has an unlimited uplink bandwidth to the Internet and the channel capacity of WLAN is unlimited. However, the fixed rate strategy fails to be optimal if a more realistic model with limited capacity is considered. A substitute pricing scheme for access service provisioning is hence proposed. In particular, the AP first estimates the probable utility degradation of existing users consequent upon the admission of an incoming user. Second, the AP decides: (i) whether the incoming user should be accepted; and (ii) the price to be announced in order to try to maximize the overall revenue. The condition, under which the proposed scheme results in a perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE), is investigated.