Wireless incentive engineering

The successful operation of emerging public wireless LANs requires flexible network mechanisms that can support differentiated or tiered services for a variety of applications such as bursty transactional web applications as well as reservation demanding voice and video applications. Congestion pricing has been proposed as one promising solution to traffic control because it accurately models the cost that each user’s traffic imposes on network congestion points. The underlying assumption of congestion pricing is that users will respond to a monetary-based price signal to maximize their own utility. We observe, however, that monetary service charge is largely a business concern and not a traffic control concern because operators and users prefer simple, predictable, and stable service charges such as flat-rate or block-rate charging. Therefore, we argue, that traffic control techniques such as congestion pricing should be decoupled from monetary service charges. Under such a new regime, however, a user’s response to a non-monetary price signal would be quite different from utility maximization, and without the appropriate incentives for users to cooperate such a regime would lead to the “tragedy of the commons” phenomenon, undermining any future differentiated service offerings by wireless Internet service providers. To address this problem we propose wireless incentive engineering mechanisms for mobile devices and access points that provide incentives for mobile users to cooperatively use different classes of services without relying on monetary service charging. Wireless incentive engineering possesses a number of beneficial properties including minimizing the algorithmic and protocol overhead on mobile devices and access points, Nash bargaining fairness, and incentive compatibility for mobile users promoting the truthful selection of service class and bandwidth declaration. We use analysis, simulation, and experimental results from a wireless testbed to demonstrate the effectiveness of wireless incentive engineering.