Demand and pricing effects on the radio resource allocation of multimedia communication systems

Over the years, radio resource management has been benchmarked mostly by its technical merits. A service provider, however, must also reckon with economics. When the financial needs of the provider and the satisfaction of the users are considered, common objectives in radio resource management, like maximising throughput or meeting various quality constraints, may no longer be sufficient. We analyse next generation communication systems by including models of economics, which have been presented in the literature, and reasonable considerations to depict the users/provider relationship in a generalised multimedia environment. In particular, we develop a model of users' satisfaction, in which both requested quality of service and price paid are taken into account. The model enables us to investigate how resource allocation dynamics affect operator revenues and to derive some useful insights. Radio resource management can be shown to be highly dependent on economic considerations. The provider's task to determine the best usage of the network capacity is heavily affected by the users' service demand and their reactions to the pricing policy. Thus, the economic scenario needs to be taken into account to exploit the constrained radio resource efficiently. The model is applied to a CDMA cellular system.