Abstract
M.Ing.
The development of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies offers a novel
platform for IP-based service resale via Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) that provide
high network coverage and lower infrastructure cost. In this IP-based service resale business, the Access Point (AP) providers sets their pricing policies as IP-based service resellers to maximize their profits, while the resale-users (end users of the WMNs) who are
price- and quality-of-service (QoS)- sensitive, respond to AP providers’ pricing policies
by controlling their usage. This research exploits the efficiency of dynamic pricing by integrating pricing into best effort based WMNs as an economic control tool to optimize the profit of the AP providers and improve the utilization of their limited uplink bandwidth by taking into consideration the resale-users’ price- and QoS- sensitivity. Two cases are presented in this thesis: a monopoly, where a single AP provider aims to maximize its profit while guaranteeing its resale-users with a minimum allocated bandwidth; and a duopoly, where two AP providers compete to maximize their individual profits based on the resale-users’ price- and delay- sensitivity. For both cases, the limited uplink bandwidth of the AP providers is considered as a bottleneck of the WMN. We propose two dynamic pricing models for these two cases respectively and investigate how pricing depends on the assumptions that we make about the market. Indeed, the pricing model proposed for the monopoly is a preliminary study for the duopoly pricing model. In formulating and analyzing these two pricing models, we see how prices are driven by the profit-maximizing aim of one AP provider and the competition between two AP providers.