What Can Pricing do in Wireless Networks?

Price is an long-time proved effective lever in a complicated system like human society. In such a society, people often needs to compete for a same set of limited resources. However, the demand of different people and the potential welfare generated from the usage the resource (utilization) is so different that a universal allocation scheme is unlikely to work well in large scale. Economic rules based on pricing has proved itself effective in optimizing the usage of the society’s limited resources to achieve best social and individual welfare. A communication network has a lot in common with a social society. In fact, one often denotes a society as a “network” of human being. In such a network, resources like bandwidth and spectrum are also limited. The utilization of using these resource are different. Allocating these limited resource to optimize the network operation for everybody, including users and operators, is difficult given the complexity of current network environment. Recent research on applying pricing to communication networks has shown that pricing is a viable approach in optimizing the operation of a communication network. Researchers has proposed pricing-based approach for various aspects of networks, including call admission control (CAC), Quality of Service (QoS), routing and many more. Wireless networks, in addition to these common issues, have their own specific issues that need to be addressed. In this paper, we survey some recent works on using pricing-based scheme to improve the operation of wireless technologies. Works on common issues like routing and QoS are also useful to wireless networks. However, they are not the focus of this survey. Our focus is on using pricing for wireless-specific issues, which we discuss below.