Decentralized management of persistent bandwidth provision for mobile devices in cellular radio networks

WLAN, GSM and UMTS are the most acquainted radio networks for digital telephony and data transfer and for this reason (business) applications arise rapidly. In contrast to wire networks (e.g. Ethernet), radio networks have strict restraints: because of their physical characteristics radio networks implicate a permanent contest about bandwidth; a static access point is sharing one frequency together with all mobile user devices connected. Thus a competition for the bandwidth naturally arises as the bottleneck bandwidth is available to all participants and cannot be extended unlimited in a fixed number of usable channels. The paper introduces an economic approach that balances the scarce quantity of bandwidth in a market system with the help of an internal payment system. This coordination of bandwidth can be implemented both by a central point - like a stock market instance - or decentralized within the radio network cells. Research results, comparing central coordination to a decentralized organized subject to different network topologies and -parameters have shown that networks underlying high dynamic appearance of peers outperform the centralized mechanism by far. Furthermore, it is shown, that for the dispersion of bandwidth and the choice of the access point, market mechanisms can be mapped to radio networks and efficient allocations can be reached in comparison to previous techniques and central coordination.