Availability and Pricing Combined Framework for Rivalry Flying Access Network Providers

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in building a joint availability and access cost policy for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)-empowered flying access networks. Indeed, we build a duopoly model to capture the adversarial behavior of UAVs operators in terms of their pricing and availability strategies. That is UAVs operators need to decide about the optimal beaconing period (period needed to send short messages advertising the existence of a UAV) while saving energy. Furthermore, they need to decide about the best price strategy in order to maximize their respective market share. Therefore, a tractable analysis for the game's Nash Equilibrium, both in terms of pricing and availability is derived. We show that this special game exhibits some very interesting properties as it is sub-modular with respect to the availability policy, whereas it is super-modular with respect to the service fee. Furthermore, we implement a learning scheme using best-response dynamics that allows operators to learn their joint pricing-availability strategies in a fast, accurate yet completely distributed fashion. Extensive simulations show the convergence of the proposed schemes to the joint pricing-availability Nash equilibrium and provide attractive insights on how the game parameters could be set to control the duopoly.