Title: A game-theoretic approach to maximise payoff and customer retention for differentiated services in a heterogeneous network environment

Authors: Pushpa Singh; Rajeev Agrawal

Addresses: Accurate Institute of Management & Technology, Knowledge Park-III, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201306, India ' G.L. Bajaj Institute of Technology & Management, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201306, India

Abstract: Future networks are being devised with the vision of heterogeneity in which a mobile user/device will be able to connect seamlessly to multiple wireless networks (WLAN, Cellular, WMAN, WPAN) and evolve simultaneously. Coexistence of underlying network is the requirement of telecom industry, which leads to an open competition among the service providers. To survive in the market, telecom operators are investing more in retaining the valuable users rather than acquiring new users. Proposed work introduces the user agent to check the loyalty of user and application preference, and network agent is used to rank network as social, quality, and normal network. The user can also set his preference as social trust, quality trust, and normal trust. A game between user agent and network agent constructs a payoff matrix for loyal user and normal user. Results show seven equilibrium cases for loyal user where user agent and network agent have equal payoff. In case of normal user there is only one case of equilibrium and in the other cases the network agent can maximise his payoff.

Keywords: heterogeneous network; QoS; loyalty; payoff; game theory; fuzzy; traffic class; bandwidth; reputation; reliability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2019.099017

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2019 Vol.16 No.2, pp.146 - 159

Received: 17 Nov 2017
Accepted: 30 Sep 2018
Published online: 12 Apr 2019 *

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