A game theoretical formulation of integrated admission control and pricing in wireless networks

We consider a competitive environment with several wireless network providers offering high data rate services and assume that users activate ephemeral session subscriptions with these providers. In the cases of overcharging or substantial service degradation by the serving networks, the users have the possibility to withdraw their request or terminate earlier their session subscription, respectively. In this context, network providers should attempt to optimize a more general utility function that incorporates technical, as well as other subjective parameters like money revenue, reputation, and user satisfaction. Considering such parameters, we formulate the problem of session establishment as an extensive form game between the different parties involved namely the provider, its current users, and the potential customer. The solution of this game produces an integrated pricing and admission control policy that achieves the network provider's optimum utility, while ensuring the satisfaction of all sides. The main contribution of our study is an admission policy that can adapt to environmental variations by proper parameter tuning. We compare our session admission control scheme with a purely technical algorithm and prove that our admission policy reflects the current requirements of the environment, yielding higher utility values to the provider. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.