Integration of pricing with call admission control for wireless networks

Abstract

Traditional call admission control (CAC) schemes that mainly focus on the trade off between new call blocking probability and handoff call blocking probability can not solve the problem of congestion in wireless networks. We investigate the role of pricing as an additional dimension of the call admission control process in order to efficiently and effectively control the use of wireless network resources. First we prove that for a given wireless network there exists a new call arrival rate which can maximize the total utility of users. Based on this result and observation we propose an integrated pricing and call admission control scheme, where the price is adjusted dynamically based on the current network conditions, in order to alleviate the problem of congestion. We compare the performance of our approach with the corresponding results of conventional systems where pricing is not taken into consideration in the call admission control process. These performance results verify the considerable improvement that can be achieved by the integration of pricing in the call admission control process in cellular networks.