System Model and Equilibrium Strategy of Mobile Users in a Hybrid Access Network

Mobile users usually access the Internet via a hybrid access network, in which cellular and Wi-Fi networks are available alternatively. In the hybrid access network, a mobile user decides to send or not to send a packet according to the number of packets already in the system and the phase of the server. In order to evaluate the system performance of the hybrid access network, in this paper we first establish a fully observable continuous time Markovian queueing system. Then, we present an exact analysis to investigate the behavior of the mobile users in the network. Through iterations and diagonalization, we obtain the expected sojourn time of a newly arriving packet in a closed form. Moreover, with the monotonicity for the expected sojourn time of a newly arriving packet, we prove the existence of the Nash equilibrium strategy. Finally, we analyze the socially optimal strategy and motivate the mobile users to accept the socially optimal strategy by changing the sojourn cost.