A source-destination based dynamic pricing scheme to control congestion in heterogeneous wireless networks

Dynamic pricing has been used to control congestion in mobile wireless networks (MWNs). In dynamic pricing, users are incentivized to time-shift their non-critical usage from the peak hours when the price is high, to off-peak hours when the price is low. The current dynamic pricing (SDP) schemes only consider the congestion level in the call-originating cell and neglect the call-destination cell in the dynamic price computation. The main problem with these schemes is that, when majority of the users in a congested cell are callees, dynamic pricing is ineffective because callers and not callees pay for network services, and resources used by callers and callees are the same for symmetric services. For example, application of dynamic pricing does not deter a callee located in a congested cell from receiving a call, which originates from a caller located in an uncongested cell. To address this problem, we propose a source-destination based dynamic pricing (SDBDP) scheme, which considers congestion levels in both the call-originating and call-destination cells to compute the dynamic price paid by a caller. An analytical model based on Markov decision chain has been developed in this work. Numerical simulations have been carried out in MATLAB for arbitrary caller-callee distributions in a typical day. Call blocking and call dropping probabilities have been used as the performance metrics to compare the current SDP schemes to the proposed SDBDP scheme. Results obtained show that the proposed SDBDP scheme achieves better congestion control than the existing SDP schemes, under arbitrary caller-callee distribution.