Incentive Engineering in Wireless LAN Based Access Networks

Traffic regulation in public and private wireless LANs face a number of significant challenges, particularly in commercial networks where there is a need for efficient regulation of bursty transactional applications, support for bandwidth reservation services while inhibiting bandwidth hogging by mobile devices, and incentivizing user cooperation. In this paper, we take a new approach to solving these problems by applying incentive engineering techniques to wireless access networks. We design two incentive-based allocation service classes: an instantaneous allocation (IA) class, which provides better throughput, and a stable allocation (SA) class, which provides better allocation stability. Our approach possesses a number of beneficial properties including minimizing the algorithmic and protocol overhead on mobile devices, Nash bargaining fairness for the IA service, and incentive compatibility for mobile users promoting the truthfully 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 engineering1.