A technical and micro-economic analysis of wireless LANs

In this paper, we present a joint economic and technical analysis of a wireless LAN, where we model the user behavior as aimed at the choice of the transmission rate. User rate allocation requests are determined in a decentralized manner by considering the tradeoff between service requirements and willingness to pay the service price. Then, the multiple users´ medium access is considered and the resulting allocation is evaluated and discussed. We provide results for what concerns the allocated resource, the number of satisfied users and the revenue coming from the assignment. All these metrics are shown to be connected, since they are strongly influenced by the service appreciation rate; however, they are also dependent on the price setting, which has to be acceptable for the users and allow efficient resource usage. Moreover, we investigate in particular the sensitivity to the number of possible system customers. These considerations are finally extended to gain general insights on the performance of the distributed coordination function of IEEE 802.11b.