A Base Station Workload-Aware Dynamic Pricing Scheme for Mobile Internet Access

Abstract

The ever-increasing traffic created by mobile Internet users has challenged ISPs to implement fair pricing scheme. Time-based pricing schemes could be used to address this problem giving users the opportunity to choose when they desire to spend their own resources to access the Internet. However, distinct base stations that make up a cellular data network often do not experience the same workload over time. Thus, a time-based pricing approach could create an undesirable situation to users who happen to be in a region covered by a base station that is currently overloaded. This paper presents a workload-aware dynamic time-based pricing scheme which uses historical workload of each base station to differentiate prices in order to foster the geographically distribution of the Internet accesses over the ISP's network. We evaluate the proposed pricing scheme via simulation using some human mobility models, and compare it with two other state-of-the-art pricing schemes. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to better redistribute the network workload among a larger number of base stations in different human mobility models, when compared to the alternatives. This allows ISP's to accommodate a larger number of users since our approach help ISP to avoid the overload of base station resources.