Attractive pricing mechanism for connection sharing and coverage extension of wireless networks

This paper proposes an attractive and efficient pricing mechanism in order to provide incentives for private wireless nodes to collaborate each others with the aim of offering an Internet public access service. Thanks to the proposed strategy, a natural extension of the wireless coverage area can be realized by the users which decide to share their resources in order to reduce their connection fee. The mechanism takes into account the users´ utility function and it has the aim of reaching the overall network efficiency using pricing as a way not only to share transmission resources but to control and prevent the network congestion as well. The obtained results show the goodness of the proposed strategy in terms of profits obtained by the nodes who decided to share their resources and overall network utility due to an high clients´ satisfaction degree.