Regulating network traffic by exploiting the price elasticity of demand in wireless random access networks

In this paper, pricing is adopted as incentive mechanism to encourage users to choose their access probabilities considering the real-time network congestion level in a contention-based wireless random access network. A Stackelberg leader-follower game is formulated to analyze the competitive interaction between the service provider and the users. In particular, each user chooses the access probability to optimize its payoff, while the self-interested service provider decides whether to admit or reject the user´s connection request in order to optimize its revenue. The stability of the Stackelberg leader-follower game in terms of convergence to the Nash equilibrium is established. The proposed CAC scheme is completely distributed and can be implemented by individual access points using only local information. Compared with the existing schemes, the proposed scheme limits the amount of traffic admitted into the network and achieves higher QoS performance without decreasing the total revenue of the service provider.