A non-cooperative TV white space broadband market model for rural entrepreneurs

Leveraging on recent TV white space communications developments in regulations,standards initiatives and technology, this paper considers a suitable next generation network comprising of two primary users (PUs) that compete to offer a service to a group of secondary users (SUs) in the form of mesh routers that belong to different entrepreneurs participating in a non-cooperative TV white space trading. From a game theoretic perspective the non-cooperative interaction of the PUs is viewed as a pricing problem wherein each PU strives to maximize its own profit. Subsequently the problem is formulated as a Bertrand game in an oligopolistic market where the PUs are players who are responsible for selling TV white spectrum in the market while the SUs are the players who are the buyers of the TV white spectrum. The PUs strategise by way of price adjustment, so much such that SUs tend to favour the lowest price when buying. The interoperator agreements are based on the delay and throughput QoS performance metrics respectively. A performance evaluation of both models is comparatively performed with regards to parameters such as cost, generated revenue, profit, best response in price adjustments and channel quality. The throughput based analytic model fares better in terms of providing channel quality as it has a better strategy which is a decreased price value.