TY - JOUR
T1 - Time-Dependent Pricing for Bandwidth Slicing under Information Asymmetry and Price Discrimination
AU - Zhou, Zhenyu
AU - Wang, Bingchen
AU - Gu, Bo
AU - Ai, Bo
AU - Mumtaz, Shahid
AU - Rodriguez, Jonathan
AU - Guizani, Mohsen
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 3, 2019; revised January 3, 2020 and April 17, 2020; accepted May 19, 2020. Date of publication June 9, 2020; date of current version November 18, 2020. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Number 61971189, the Science and Technology Project of State Grid Corporation of China under Grant Number SGSDDK00KJJS1900405, the Exploration Project of State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources (North China Electric Power University) under Grant Number LAPS2019-12, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant Number 2020MS001, and the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant Number 2019YFB1704702. This article was presented in part at the International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC’18), Limassol, Cyprus, 2018. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was T. He. (Corresponding author: Bo Gu.) Zhenyu Zhou is with the State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System With Renewable Energy Sources, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China (e-mail: [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1972-2012 IEEE.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/6/9
Y1 - 2020/6/9
N2 - Due to the bursty nature of Internet traffic, network service providers (NSPs) are forced to expand their network capacity in order to meet the ever-increasing peak-time traffic demand, which is however costly and inefficient. How to shift the traffic demand from peak time to off-peak time is a challenging task for NSPs. In this paper, we study the implementation of time-dependent pricing (TDP) for bandwidth slicing in software-defined cellular networks under information asymmetry and price discrimination. Congestion prices indicating real-time congestion levels of different links are used as a signal to motivate delay-tolerant users to defer their traffic demands. We formulate the joint pricing and bandwidth demand optimization problem as a two-stage Stackelberg leader-follower game. Then, we investigate how to derive the optimal solutions under the scenarios of both complete and incomplete information. Wealso extend the results from the simplified case of a single congested link to the more complicated case of multiple congested links, where price discrimination is employed to dynamically adjust the price of each congested link in accordance with its real-time congestion level. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed pricing scheme achieves superior performance in increasing the NSP’s revenue and reducing the peak-to-average traffic ratio (PATR).
AB - Due to the bursty nature of Internet traffic, network service providers (NSPs) are forced to expand their network capacity in order to meet the ever-increasing peak-time traffic demand, which is however costly and inefficient. How to shift the traffic demand from peak time to off-peak time is a challenging task for NSPs. In this paper, we study the implementation of time-dependent pricing (TDP) for bandwidth slicing in software-defined cellular networks under information asymmetry and price discrimination. Congestion prices indicating real-time congestion levels of different links are used as a signal to motivate delay-tolerant users to defer their traffic demands. We formulate the joint pricing and bandwidth demand optimization problem as a two-stage Stackelberg leader-follower game. Then, we investigate how to derive the optimal solutions under the scenarios of both complete and incomplete information. Wealso extend the results from the simplified case of a single congested link to the more complicated case of multiple congested links, where price discrimination is employed to dynamically adjust the price of each congested link in accordance with its real-time congestion level. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed pricing scheme achieves superior performance in increasing the NSP’s revenue and reducing the peak-to-average traffic ratio (PATR).
KW - Time-dependent pricing
KW - bandwidth slicing
KW - information asymmetry
KW - price discrimination
KW - software-defined cellular networks
U2 - 10.1109/TCOMM.2020.3001050
DO - 10.1109/TCOMM.2020.3001050
M3 - Article
SN - 0090-6778
VL - 68
SP - 6975
EP - 6989
JO - IEEE Transactions on Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Communications
IS - 11
M1 - 9112235
ER -