Congestion Pricing in Wireless Cellular Networks

While the demand for wireless cellular services continues to increase, radio resources remain scarce. As a result, network operators have to competently manage these resources in order to increase the efficiency of their Wireless Cellular Networks (WCN) and meet the Quality of Service (QoS) of different users. A key component of Radio Resource Management (RRM) is congestion control. Congestion can severely degrade the performance of WCN and affect the satisfaction of the users and the obtained revenues. Several congestion control techniques have been proposed for WCN. These techniques, however, do not provide incentives to the users to use the wireless network rationally, and hence they cannot solve the problem of congestion. Recently, there has been some research on providing monetary incentives to the users through congestion pricing to use the wireless network rationally and efficiently. Congestion pricing is a promising solution that can help alleviate the problem of congestion and generate higher revenues for network operators. This paper surveys recent research work on congestion pricing in WCN. It also provides detailed discussions and comparisons of the surveyed work as well as open problems and possible future research directions in the area.