Title: Increasing wireless access capacity with revenue managed service pricing

Authors: Neil Keon

Addresses: Department of Information Technology and Operations Management, Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

Abstract: The demand for communications services tends to vary from hour to hour, as observed in voice and wireless communications. Therefore, network capacity must be designed and built for peak period demand. This is inefficient when there are prolonged off-peak periods. Recently, a rich literature is developing on novel pricing schemes to regulate demand. In broad terms, there is interest in real-time pricing, where fixed capacity is better managed by creating incentives, through prices, to increase off-peak use and reduce peak use. Such schemes should be considered at a time scale beyond the real-time consumption decision, to assess effects on capacity planning. Understanding the effects on network capacity utilisation of such schemes (beyond the real-time setting) is important so that peak to off-peak shifts in use are not thought of simply as relieving real-time congestion, but rather increasing the overall capacity of a network, in terms of number of subscribers served.

Keywords: service pricing; load balancing; capacity planning; revenue management; wireless pricing; network capacity; wireless networks; revenue management; mobile networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMNDI.2006.012087

International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation, 2006 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.175 - 187

Published online: 20 Jan 2007 *

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