A Survey of Pricing Schemes in Wireless Networks

Abstract

The expansion of new technologies is expected to offer economic growth in the wired and wireless technological networking environment, while at the same time, it will offer a wide variety of services and give the possibility for utilizing technologies for the benefit of many subscribers. The Pricing Schemes are designed to offer profitable business to the Wireless Service Providers (WSPs), as well as, to create favorable services for the mobile subscribers and eventually to get charged according to their services usage. In this paper, the Pricing Schemes are classified, based on their ability to adapt to the needs of the WSPs and their subscribers during the entire service period, into Static-based Pricing and Dynamic-based Pricing Schemes. The Pricing Schemes are also analyzed in detail and are further classified according to the factors involved in the price calculation of a service, i.e. the Service Level Agreement (SLA), the subscription type, the negotiation capabilities between WSPs and their subscribers, the network capacity, the available bandwidth and frequency spectrum, the network hops, and the Base Stations (BSs). The affected elements by the pricing network are also discussed, together with the performance evaluation of the presented pricing schemes.

Analysis of a Pricing Method for Elastic Services with Guaranteed GoS

“…The price depends on the holding prices (bandwidth reserve), the usage price (average usage, the elasticity of the traffic) and the congestion price. References [15][16][17] present the issue of pricing related to different scenarios and further features for the offered services. Thus in [15] the authors briefly review the state of the art and technological growth of congestion control for integrated service networks since pricing is a proper tool to manage congestion, encourage network growth, and allocate resource to users in a fair manner.…”

“…Thus in [15] the authors briefly review the state of the art and technological growth of congestion control for integrated service networks since pricing is a proper tool to manage congestion, encourage network growth, and allocate resource to users in a fair manner. Reference [16] is one of the first books that treat conjunctly technology and pricing and, in reference [17] the authors present a recent classification of the proposed pricing methods in wireless networks. In references [18][19][20] different methods are presented to determine the user utilization function.…”

Sincronización de la información de tasación en entornos convergentes

“…Por ejemplo, el modelo de tasación basado en volumen usa la cantidad de datos transferida como un criterio, y define un precio por cada KB transferido. Otro modelo muy usado es el modelo basado en tiempo, el cual usa el tiempo transcurrido como criterio y el modelo basado en contenidos, el cual usa el tipo de servicio/contenido proveído como el criterio de cobro [13] [14].…”

Online Charging Based on Machine Context for M2M Communication in LTE

“…This work utilizes the well-known concept of congestion-based pricing [9,18], which enables charging of network resources by using a higher tariff when the network is congested, and by using a normal tariff otherwise. An example is the Network Load Based Pricing Scheme [17] in LTE, in which network congestion is determined by a threshold parameter, expressed as a certain percentage of the maximum network load.…”

“…One mechanism that does that is based on dynamic congestion-based pricing plans, meaning that the network traffic sent through the mobile network while the network is congested is charged at a higher rate [9,18]. Congestion-based pricing plans are particularly suitable for M2M services (or classes of services) that have deterministic or foreseeable communication requirements [19].…”