Pricing and revenue optimization strategy in macro-femto heterogeneous networks

Abstract

The ongoing enhancement of mobile devices capabilities and advanced technologies has largely contributed to the huge increase of wireless traffic demand. Mobile network operators around the world are struggling to manage this new era of higher generation networks by finding new means and strategies to implement in order to meet the explosion in traffic demand. One of the current and most efficient strategies to handle this issue is the femtocell technology, which now has drawn the interest of main concerned actors as for manufacturers, operators, and researchers. In this paper, our main motivation was to address the macro-femto heterogeneous networks deployment issue from the economic side. Thus, we aimed to propose a pricing strategy for macro-femto networks with a user centric vision where users would have the choice to access one of the networks based on the proposed service price when he/she is accessing it. Based on our strategy, a wireless service provider's (WSP's) revenue optimization is then performed and evaluated in order to show the efficiency of our proposed pricing scheme.