A Quality of Service-Enabled Pricing Approach for Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Heterogeneous wireless access networks (HWAN) will create a market for the delivery of an extensive collection of novel and attractive services and contents. Accounting and pricing the ubiquitous services will play a key role from both service providers and users point of view. By one hand, wireless service providers (WSP) look for the maximum revenue and utilization rate and by other hand users will select service providers depending on the offered price and the Quality of Service (QoS) assurance. In such a market-based scenario, accounting will become an effective tool that satisfies the users´ service demands and maximizes the revenue of the providers. For WSP is of vital importance to define a charging and accounting architecture that supports fast and easy the provision of existent and new services with the best quality. In this sense, a dynamical network selection mechanism has to be developed to decide an appropriate radio access cell or technology for a specific service. Additionally, service providers must consider alternative solutions to situations where the best quality for the requested service cannot be provided, allowing them maintaining a high user satisfaction level. In this paper we propose a simple QoS-based dynamic pricing approach for services provisioning into a heterogeneous wireless access networks environment which attempts to increase user´s satisfaction level by firstly, maximizing the provided QoS level, and secondly, by applying dynamic pricing strategies according to the QoS. These strategies will allow service providers to maximize their profits. Simulations results demonstrate that the proposed dynamic pricing approach benefits both users and WSP. Results suggest that users have better overall satisfaction due to a better QoS level and fairer prices. The analysis shows that our proposed pricing approach helps increasing WSPs profits compared to the application of the flat-rate pricing model into a competitive market-model.