Two-Fold Pricing to Guarantee Individual Profits and Maximum Social Welfare in Wireless Access Networks

In a multi-hop wireless access network where each node is an independent self-interested commercial entity, pricing is helpful not only to encourage collaboration but also to utilize the network resources efficiently. In this paper, we propose a market-based model with two-fold pricing (TFP) for wireless access networks. In our model, the relay-pricing is used to encourage nodes to forward each other´s packets. That is, each node is paid off for the relay service it provides. We also consider interference- pricing to leverage optimal resource allocation. We prove that TFP guarantees positive profit for each individual wireless node for a wide range of pricing functions. The profit increases as the node forwards more packets. Thus, the cooperative nodes are well rewarded. We then determine the relay and the interference pricing functions such that the network social welfare and the aggregate network utility are maximized. Simulation results show that, compared to a recently proposed single-fold pricing (SFP) model where only the relay prices are considered, our proposed TFP scheme significantly increases the total network profit and the network throughput. TFP also leads to more fair revenue sharing and profit distribution among the wireless relay nodes.