Dynamic pricing with "alternatives" for mobile networks

Abstract

Dynamic pricing has been used as an effective means to alleviate network congestion in mobile networks. It is potentially capable of gaining higher revenue over the fixed pricing scheme. However, the dynamic pricing scheme fails to provide user satisfaction since there is absolutely no guarantee that, during the time of congestion, users could get the service with their expected price. In this paper, we propose a new pricing scheme that gives choices to mobile users between dynamic prices with superior quality of service or fixed low price with an acceptable performance degradation. The performance results verify that the new pricing scheme improves the overall system utilization and yet guarantees users' satisfaction.