Cost savings and service availability are two major concerns of a network provider adopting multi-hop cellular networking technology. Monetary incentives not only affect the motivation of the intermediate nodes supporting relaying services but represent the costs of providing connection services in multi-hop cellular networks. In this research, we propose incentive pricing schemes for relaying services considering both relaying costs and service availability in multi-hop cellular networks. In order to react effectively to the dynamic and unpredictable variations of the wireless networks, we present an incentive pricing scheme based on the actual network conditions to maximize the revenue of the network provider while maintaining service availability in the networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the revenue can be increased by properly changing the price of the incentives according to the number of mobile nodes capable of providing relaying services. Furthermore, the proposed pricing scheme does not result in a high new call blocking probability in relaying service area.
Consequently, dynamically adjusting the price of the incentives is more appropriate than fixed-rate pricing for the network provider to make maximum revenue.
In addition to providing a uniform price of the incentives to all mobile nodes depending on the network situations, we also investigate how to give different amount of incentives for each mobile node that has different effects on supporting hop-by-hop connections. When a pre-constructed routing topology exists in the networks, we present a location-based incentive pricing for relaying services. Since all packets simply follow the routing topology toward the destination, each intermediate node has a significant impact on the success of the multi-hop connections from all nodes in its sub-tree to the base station. The proposed location-based pricing scheme adjusts the price of the feedback incentives for each node according to the number of nodes that reside in its sub-tree. The proposed scheme shifts incentives from the
nodes of low importance to the nodes of high importance in the routing topology. Simulation results indicate that the proposed pricing scheme results in higher service availability than the fixed-rate pricing scheme under different forms for supply function of price of feedback and willingness of forwarding packets.
Since the high costs of building a pre-constructed routing topology, we propose another pricing scheme for the multi-hop cellular networks without a pre-constructed routing topology.
A new metric called Quality-of-Relay (QoR) is defined to evaluate the importance of each mobile node affecting other nodes that require hop-by-hop connections to reach the central base station. As the location-based pricing for tree-based relaying services, the QoR-based pricing scheme also shift incentives from the nodes of low importance to the nodes of high importance.
Simulation results indicate that the QoR-based pricing scheme can enhance service availability with only a slight increase in relaying costs. Besides, we adopt QoR value of each mobile node in the networks to select a relaying path for connecting to the central base station. Although shortest path is the most simple and common metric used in the routing protocol, it may route almost packets over a few paths and result in network congestion and resource unavailable in hot spot. The routing scheme based on QoR value can retain more valuable resource for later relaying requests, thereby accepting more relaying connections. Simulation results indicate the proposed QoR-based routing scheme causes a lower new call blocking probability than the shortest-path routing scheme under a certain constraint on maximum relaying capacity of each mobile node.
Here, we would like to mention the following areas of investigation which may merit further study.
z The supply flexibility in providing relaying services can be considered as a factor in the incentive pricing scheme.
z Performance of the proposed QoR-based routing scheme is evaluated by comparing
with the shortest-path routing scheme. In this research, the QoR-based pricing scheme causes minimum relaying costs because the network provider is assumed to adopt the QoR-based incentive pricing scheme. The comparison in relaying costs between these two routing schemes when using different pricing schemes can be conducted in the future.
z In the location-based incentive pricing scheme, a basic price must be determined to adjust the price of the feedback incentives for each mobile node. The optimal price derived in the pricing model based on number of mobile nodes may be utilized as the basic price for the location-based incentive pricing scheme and the QoR-based incentive pricing scheme. The revenue of the network provider in the location-based incentive pricing scheme or the QoR-based incentive pricing scheme can be further investigated and compared to the maximum revenue of the network provider.
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