Unlicensed LTE Pricing for Tiered Content Delivery and Heterogeneous User Access

Abstract

It has been a significant issue to satisfy the rapidly growing data traffic with the limited wireless radio resources. Licensed-assisted access to unlicensed spectrum (e.g., LAA) brings hope for the service provider (SP) to mitigate the deficiency of radio resources. This work contributes on designing a pricing model in a licensed and unlicensed coexisting network, modelled as a two-sided market with content providers (CPs) and end users (EUs) at the SP's two sides. A premium content delivery deal is further designed via the optimal auction in order to efficiently allocate the scarce radio resources for the CPs with higher traffic load and QoS requirement. Thus, the SP and CPs form a prioritized spectrum game, and the SP and EUs form a radio access subscription game. By backward induction, we derive the basic delivery price and the premium delivery price to CPs, the reservation price, and the LTE-only and LAA subscription prices to EUs. Analysis shows that all players benefit from the premium delivery deal and co-existence of unlicensed LTE. When the unlicensed spectrum becomes reliable, all players’ payoffs and the subscription ratio increase. In addition, the impact of the subsidies and technology heterogeneity are also addressed in this article.