A tradeoff pricing strategy using AHP for revenue maximization in WiMAX networks

Pricing plays a crucial role in trading any resource or service in the existing Broadband Wireless Access system i.e. WiMAX. Through a proper pricing strategy, a wireless service provider would like to achieve the highest revenue, while the end users would like to achieve the highest satisfaction from service usage. In order to make it feasible, in this paper we propose a tradeoff policy between the user satisfaction and profit of the service providers. In addition, we also propose a Call Admission Control (CAC) mechanism to control various level of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee of the WiMAX service classes viz. UGS, rtPS, nrtPS and BE. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to prove the consistency of the assumed order of preference of the various QoS parameters for each service classes. Simulation results shows that our proposed tradeoff price maximizes the revenue of the service providers as it provides more user satisfaction or higher level of QoS guarantee to the end users.