1,853 research outputs found
A Hierarchical Game with Strategy Evolution for Mobile Sponsored Content and Service Markets
In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers
are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the
mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged
by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to
a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the
sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we
study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the
mobile users, the content/service providers and the network operator, as a
two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is
featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers'
grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the
service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower
sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the
content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative
equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed
game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence,
and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium
searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed
algorithm, and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers'
profits and the users' experience
Optimal Pricing Effect on Equilibrium Behaviors of Delay-Sensitive Users in Cognitive Radio Networks
This paper studies price-based spectrum access control in cognitive radio
networks, which characterizes network operators' service provisions to
delay-sensitive secondary users (SUs) via pricing strategies. Based on the two
paradigms of shared-use and exclusive-use dynamic spectrum access (DSA), we
examine three network scenarios corresponding to three types of secondary
markets. In the first monopoly market with one operator using opportunistic
shared-use DSA, we study the operator's pricing effect on the equilibrium
behaviors of self-optimizing SUs in a queueing system. %This queue represents
the congestion of the multiple SUs sharing the operator's single \ON-\OFF
channel that models the primary users (PUs) traffic. We provide a queueing
delay analysis with the general distributions of the SU service time and PU
traffic using the renewal theory. In terms of SUs, we show that there exists a
unique Nash equilibrium in a non-cooperative game where SUs are players
employing individual optimal strategies. We also provide a sufficient condition
and iterative algorithms for equilibrium convergence. In terms of operators,
two pricing mechanisms are proposed with different goals: revenue maximization
and social welfare maximization. In the second monopoly market, an operator
exploiting exclusive-use DSA has many channels that will be allocated
separately to each entering SU. We also analyze the pricing effect on the
equilibrium behaviors of the SUs and the revenue-optimal and socially-optimal
pricing strategies of the operator in this market. In the third duopoly market,
we study a price competition between two operators employing shared-use and
exclusive-use DSA, respectively, as a two-stage Stackelberg game. Using a
backward induction method, we show that there exists a unique equilibrium for
this game and investigate the equilibrium convergence.Comment: 30 pages, one column, double spac
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