A measurement-based adaptive control mechanism for pricing in telecommunication networks

The problem of pricing for a telecommunication network is investigated with respect to the users´ sensitivity to the pricing structure. A functional optimization problem is formulated, in order to compute price reallocations as functions of data collected in real time during the network evolution. No a-priori knowledge about the users´ utility functions and the traffic demands is required, since adaptive reactions to the network conditions are sought in real time. To this aim, a neural approximation technique is studied to exploit an optimal pricing control law, able to counteract traffic changes with a small on-line computational effort. Owing to the generality of the mathematical framework under investigation, our control methodology can be generalized for other decision variables and cost functionals.