Closed-Form Pricing in Multiuser Access Networks With Incomplete Information

Pricing has been widely used to solve network optimization problems. In this paper, we study the case where the network service provider (NSP) has incomplete information about the users, such as the specific user type. Formulating the pricing of the monopolistic NSP and the flow control of the users as a two-level hierarchical game, we first obtain closed-form equilibrium solutions that jointly maximize the benefits of the monopolistic NSP and the users with heterogeneous quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Then, based on the closed-form solutions, we consider a more general and practical multi-NSP and multiuser model. We further propose a novel one-sided job-hopping matching game to obtain stable NSP-user matching that can optimize network performance in a multi-NSP and multiuser scenario. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed game-theoretic approaches in both the monopolistic and multi-NSP cases.