Two-fold pricing to guarantee individual profits and maximum social welfare in multi-hop wireless access networks

In a multi-hop wireless access network, where each node is an independent self-interested commercial entity, pricing is helpful not only to encourage collaboration but also to utilize the network resources efficiently. In this paper, we propose a market-based model with two-fold pricing (TFP) for wireless access networks. In our model, the relay-pricing is used to encourage nodes to forward packets for other nodes. Each node receives a payment for the relay service that it provides. We also consider interference-pricing to leverage optimal resource allocation. Together, the relay and interference prices incorporate both cooperative and competitive interactions among the nodes. We prove that TFP guarantees positive profit for each individual wireless node for a wide range of pricing functions. The profit increases as the node forwards more packets. Thus, the cooperative nodes are well rewarded. We then determine the relay and interference pricing functions such that the network social welfare and the aggregate network utility are maximized. Simulation results show that, compared to two recently proposed single-fold pricing models, where only the relay or only the interference prices are considered, our proposed TFP scheme significantly increases the total network profit as well as the aggregate network throughput. TFP also leads to more fair revenue sharing among the wireless relay nodes.