An incentive engineering mechanism for optimizing handoff decisions between cellular data networks and WLANs

Cellular/WLAN integration has been widely considered to be an economical and effective solution for wireless service providers to provision high bandwidth services to meet the increasing demand for data-oriented applications. Nevertheless, technological and operational differences between these two types of networks result in substantial challenges in the management of cellular/WLAN integration. In this paper, we focus on charging methods for cellular/WLAN integration. We introduce a novel pricing model that takes application characteristics, user profiles and network congestion status into account to dynamically adjust the charging rates of cellular and WLAN services. Based on this model, we develop incentive engineering mechanism that encourages the use of the appropriate networks for specific applications based on the service priority and the current network congestion status. The proposed mechanism dynamically optimizes the charging rate by adapting to changes in networks´ and users´ behaviors. Numerical results show significant improvements of the system utilization and users´ satisfaction.