Prospect theoretic user satisfaction in wireless communications networks

User satisfaction is a critical design metric of wireless communications systems and networks. In this paper, we consider user satisfaction of wireless communications networks from a human psychological point of view through the prospect theory. Due to the asymmetrical s-shaped value function and the dependence of reference point described by the prospect theory, user satisfaction is degraded significantly under dynamic reference point and dynamic value function. We show that the user satisfaction can be maximized by properly allocating resources, but the overall resource utilization will be extremely low. To combat this issue, we propose an efficient and effective reference-point aware (REPA) resource allocation scheme to maximize the weighted user satisfaction in wireless communications networks, finding a good balance between user satisfaction and resource utilization. The proposed REPA scheme is shown to achieve good performance when the prospect theory with dynamic reference point and dynamic value function is applied to the regime of user satisfaction in wireless communications networks.