Two-Fold Pricing to Guarantee Individual Profits and Maximum Social Welfare in Wireless Access Networks

In a multi-hop wireless access network where each node is an independent self-interested commercial entity, pricing is helpful not only to encourage collaboration but also to utilize the network resources efficiently. In this paper, the authors propose a market-based model with Two-Fold Pricing (TFP) for wireless access networks. In their model, the relay-pricing is used to encourage nodes to forward each other's packets. That is, each node is paid off for the relay service it provides. They also consider interference-pricing to leverage optimal resource allocation. They prove that TFP guarantees positive profit for each individual wireless node for a wide range of pricing functions.