Commercial Issues in Hybrid Cellular-ad Hoc Networks

Hybrid cellular-ad hoc network is the combination of cellular networks and ad hoc networks. Such a network is addressed to increase spatial reuse and save deployment cost. In the literature, most researchers paid attention to technical issues such as architecture and capacity of hybrid networks. In fact, before this kind of hybrid network becomes practical, some commercial issues should also be considered. In this paper, we discuss three of these issues: (1) the customer's will towards providing relay service, (2) routing metrics and routing protocol which consider customer's will, (3) charge modes for service providers and relay customers. Finally, we present some future work.