Tussle Between APs in a Location-Dependent Pricing Game

Abstract

In recent years, many pricing schemes have been proposed for network service access in wireless networks. Most of them model this access problem as a cooperative game, where the network service is assumed to be open to every user. However, few of them have considered the scenario where the network service is private, i.e., users cannot access the network service freely. In this paper, we study the network pricing of private wireless access points (APs) under the awareness of the growing popularity of private APs and the increasing attention on their potential usage of providing network service to public users. We formulate this problem as a location-dependent pricing game, and use pricing mechanism to motivate AP owners to share their private networks. Our theoretical study has identified the unique characteristics of the Nash equilibria in single AP and two AP scenarios. We further propose an optimization problem to calculate the optimal strategies in general multiple AP scenarios. The correctness and accuracy of the theoretical analysis have been validated by numerical results.