On the access pricing issues of wireless mesh networks

Abstract

This paper studies the use of pricing as an incentive mechanism to encourage private, self-interested nodes to participate in a public wireless mesh network and cooperate in the packet forwarding service. Our focus is on the "economic behavior" of the network nodes the pricing and purchasing strategies of the access point, wireless relaying nodes, and clients. We use a "game theoretic approach" to analyze their interactions from one-hop to multihop network and when the network has an unlimited or limited channel capacity. We show that the access point and relaying wireless nodes will adopt a simple, yet optimal, fixed-rate pricing strategy in a multi-hop network with an unlimited capacity. Yet, the fixed-rate pricing strategy fails to be optimal in the limited capacity case. To this end, we focus on the access point adopting a more practical "fixedrate, non-interrupted service" model and propose an algorithm based on the Markovian decision theory to devise the optimal pricing strategy.