Auction-based Congestion Pricing for Wireless Data Services

Due to the surprising growth of mobile subscribers, GSM networks have been experiencing congestion, especially in their data services. Pricing of network resources could help resolve congestion. However, due to the absence of an accurate user demand estimation, determining suitable congestion prices for the mobile networks can be problematic. In this paper, we propose an auction-based pricing approach for resource allocation in mobile data networks, specifically GPRS networks. In addition, the impact of the reserve prices of the auction mechanism on the mean system delay of the networks is investigated. The numerical results show that, by increasing the auction reserve price, the level of network congestion is significantly reduced, as indicated by the reduction of the mean system delay of the network. The tradeoff between performance improvement, due to the proposed model, and revenue optimization is also investigated.