Demand responsive pricing and competitive spectrum allocation via a spectrum server

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper we develop a framework for competition of future operators likely to operate in a mixed commons/property-rights regime under the regulation of a spectrum policy server (SPS). The operators dynamically compete for customers as well as portions of available spectrum. The operators are charged by the SPS for the amount of bandwidth they use in their services. Through demand responsive pricing, the operators try to come up with convincing service offers for the customers, while trying to maximize their profits. We first consider a single-user system as an illustrative example. We formulate the competition between the operators as a noncooperative game and propose an SPS-based iterative bidding scheme that results in a Nash equilibrium of the game. Numerical results suggest that, competition increases the user's (customer's) acceptance probability of the offered service, while reducing the profits achieved by the operators. It is also observed that as the cost of unit bandwidth increases relative to the cost of unit infrastructure (fixed cost), the operator with superior technology (higher fixed cost) becomes more competitive. We then extend the framework to a multiuser setting where the operators are competing for a number of users at once. We propose an SPSbased bandwidth allocation scheme in which the SPS optimally allocates bandwidth portions for each user-operator session to maximize its overall expected revenue resulting from the operator payments. Comparison of the performance of this scheme to one in which the bandwidth is equally shared between the useroperator pairs reveals that such an SPS-based scheme improves the user acceptance probabilities and the bandwidth utilization in multiuser systems.

A survey on spectrum management in cognitive radio networks

“…Furthermore, the central entity can lease spectrum to users in a limited geographical region for a specific amount of time. In addition to competition for the spectrum, competition for users can also be considered through a central spectrum policy server [6].…”

“…CR networks also can be equipped with CR base stations that provide single-hop connection to CR users. Finally, CR networks may include spectrum brokers that play a role in distributing the spectrum resources among different CR networks [6].…”

Spectrum Pricing Games with Spatial Reuse in Cognitive Radio Networks

“…Price competition among spectrum providers in wireless networks has been studied in [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16]. Specifically, Niyato et.…”

“…Some progress has been made in addressing the issue of bandwidth uncertainty, both in the CRN setting [19], [20] and in the context of price competition among multiple firms in the Economics literature [8]. The issue of spatial reuse, however, arises specifically in the context of spectrum trading and has not been investigated either in prior work on price competition in CRNs [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16] or otherwise. See Section II for a survey of related work.…”

NASCOR: Network Assisted Spectrum Coordination Service for Coexistence between Heterogeneous Radio Systems

“…We believe that network assistance is quite feasible given the fact that the vast majority of wireless systems are connected to the Internet. Creation of a standardized network service (initially as an overlay on IP) is expected to provide significant benefits for spectrum allocation over other techniques such as centralized spectrum servers [7], [8] or radio-based local common control channels [9], [10]. This is because the network inherently has a global view of all connected devices and can thus enable large-scale and effective coordination by disseminating radio usage information across the entire geographic region of interest.…”