Cooperative optimal pricing for stochastic access control in overlaid radio access networks

Abstract

As radio access technology has been greatly developed nowadays, dynamic spectrum allocation (DSA), with which secondary users (SUs) are able to access the spectrum allocated to primary users becomes an important method for service providers to efficiently utilize limited wireless resources. Meanwhile, call admission control of SUs in an environment with multiple possible heterogenous wireless networks supporting DSA is also evolving. In this paper, we propose a pricing-based resource allocation scheme for multiple cooperative providers. According to this scheme, SUs are charged based on current system state by service provider to join one of several radio access networks (RANs). We integrate stochastic call admission control with dynamic pricing and formulate the problem of maximizing the expectation of system revenue in the long run as an infinite horizon average reward problem which can be solved by stochastic dynamic programming. Characteristics of the optimal pricing policy are analyzed based on series of computation results under various system conditions. Simulations carried out for a small network model show that a maximum profit can be achieved under our scheme and this maximum value varies with primary user arriving rates, primary user blocking punishments and channel capacities. Using our scheme, the system income could be improved by nearly 60 % in particular cases. Also, if each RAN's probability of admitting a SU is carefully chosen, the system profit can be maximized and primary user blocking count minimized.