Demand and pricing effects on the radio resource allocation of multimedia communication systems

Over the years, Radio Resource Management has been benchmarked mostly by its technical merits. For a service provider, however, also economics must be considered. When the financial needs of the provider and the satisfaction of the users are considered, common objectives in radio resource management like maximising throughput or meeting various quality constraints, are no longer sufficient. We analyse next generation communication systems by including models of economics, presented in the literature, and reasonable considerations to depict the users/provider relationship in a generalised multimedia environment. In particular, we develop a model of users’ satisfaction, in which both requested Quality of Service and price paid are taken into account. The model enables us to investigate how resource allocation dynamics affect operator revenues and to derive some useful insights. The Radio Resource Management can be shown to highly depend on economic considerations. The provider’s task to determine the best usage of the network capacity is heavily affected by the users’ service demand and their reactions to the pricing policy. Thus, the economic scenario needs to be taken into account to efficiently exploit the constrained radio resource.