Revenue optimization via call admission control and pricing for mobile cellular systems

Service differentiation is now becoming a more and more desirable feature in mobile cellular systems making the case for pricing differentiation among the users. One of the main objectives of a mobile service provider is to maximize its revenue. In general there are two approaches to optimize the revenue rate of a base station. One is through call admission control (CAC), the other is through pricing. For most real systems it is prohibitively difficult to compute the optimal CAC policy or pricing scheme because of the `curse of dimensionality'. Therefore we focus on CAC policies that have simple structures and static pricing schemes in which the charging rates are independent of the system state. However, finding the optimal structured CAC policies or static pricing scheme is still combinatorial in nature. In this paper we show that our recently proposed iterative coordinate search algorithm provides an efficient and effective method to find the optimal or near-optimal structured CAC policies and static pricing schemes for mobile cellular systems.