Integration of WiMAX and WiFi Services: Bandwidth Sharing and Channel Collaboration

Several emerging study has focused on the pricing issue of bandwidth sharing between WiFi and WiMAX networks; however, most of them either concentrate on the design of collaborated protocols or figure out the issue without the overall consideration of customer preference and contract design. In the present study, we consider a wireless service market in which there are two wireless service providers operating WiFi and WiMAX, respectively. One of the research dimensions given in the study is whether wireless operators implement bandwidth sharing, while the other is whether wireless operators make decisions independently or jointly. By involving customer preference and wholesale price contract in the present model, we find that bandwidth sharing would benefit a WiMAX service provider, yet a WiFi service provider has no significant saving under a wholesale price contract. In addition, the profit of a WiMAX service may increase with WiFi coverage when bandwidth sharing is implemented but decease with WiFi coverage when both wireless services operate without bandwidth sharing. Besides, the WiMAX service provider would allocate more capacity when average usage rate increases, but decrease the amount of capacity when average usage rate is too large.