Hybrid pricing for TV white space database

Abstract

According to the recent rulings of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), TV white spaces (TVWS) can now be accessed by secondary users (SUs) after a list of vacant TV channels is obtained via a geo-location database. Proper business models are essential for database operators to manage the cost of maintaining geo-location databases. Database access can be simultaneously priced under two different schemes: the registration scheme and the service plan scheme. In the registration scheme, the database reserves part of the TV bandwidth for registered White Space Devices (WSD) in a soft-license way. In the service plan scheme, WSDs are charged according to their queries. In this paper, we investigate the business model for the TVWS database under a hybrid pricing scheme. We consider the scenario where a database operator employs both the registration scheme and the service plan scheme to serve the SUs. The SUs' choices of different pricing schemes are modeled as a non-cooperative game and we derive distributed algorithms to achieve the Nash Equilibrium (NE). Considering the NE of the SUs, the database operator optimally determines the pricing parameters for both pricing schemes in terms of bandwidth reservation, registration fee and query plans.