A base station congestion-dependent pricing scheme for cellular data network

The increasing of the mobile Internet traffic generated in cellular networks has challenged Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to improve the management of their resources' usage, e.g. during hours of peak demand. Time-based pricing schemes could be used to address this problem. However, in this kind of scheme, the workload of each base station is not normally considered in the methodology for pricing definition. During network peak periods, different base stations do not have the same workload and, consequently, a time-based pricing can be unfair to users who are outside of a congestion area. This paper presents a pricing scheme that uses base stations' historical workload data to differentiate prices in order to control the geographical congestion in the ISP network. We are currently simulating the proposed pricing model and other models to perform a comparative analysis in terms of performance and feasibility.

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