Priority based pricing for data traffic in WiMAX network

Microeconomics models are widely used for revenue estimation through utility functions and deployed pricing schemes. Utility functions represent the QoS (Quality of Service) perception of the user for a given service while the pricing schemes denote the provider charging policy for a service. This paper proposes novel approach for utility estimation for data traffic in WiMAX and aims to investigate the influence of the deployed pricing scheme on the provider's revenue. The paper adopts prioritization of users by invoking priority mechanisms in the network. Different pricing schemes are deployed for the priority users whereas the pricing scheme for the non priority users is fixed and predefined. The results show the effect on the revenue of the prioritization and the deployed pricing schemes for small and large number of users in the WiMAX system. Numerical results present a method for designing optimal pricing scheme for the priority users depending on the priority level. This scheme optimizes the revenue for the provider.