Alexander Zemlianov Presents at INFORMS Telecommunications Conference

Alexander Zemlianov presented a paper titled "Modeling Competition among Wireless Service Providers" at the biannual INFORMS telecommunication conference held March 7 - 10, 2004 in Boca Raton, FL. Alexander Zemlianov co-authored the paper with professor Gustavo de Veciana, who supervises his PhD studies within WNCG of UT Austin.

The paper concentrates on analysis of a scenario where wireless devices are provided with intelligence that allows them to choose one of their modes (interfaces) to communicate with two wireless service providers that use orthogonal technologies to offer their services. One example of such devices is dual mode phones that are equipped with an interface that allows connections to 3G services provider and a connection to a WiFi "hotspot". As was pointed out by G. Rittenhouse (VP, Wireless Research Laboratory, Lucent technologies) during his plenary talk, moving the decision points from access points to within the communication devices themselves is a paradigm that will allow better network scalability. However, the ability of devices to choose between the interfaces for connection is likely to affect the revenues of providers as well as the quality of service that users of the devices will experience. Analysis of the latter effects is the main goal of the paper.

The paper provides a framework for assessing the "competitiveness" of one provider with respect to the other, and the quality of service the users of such devices will receive. In particular, the authors consider a "utility based" criterion for assigning devices to access points, where a device selects an access point of a particular provider by examining such factors as quality of service (e.g. average delay) and price of service. The authors prove general convergence to equilibrium results and show that the resulting equilibrium assignment of devices to access points might have beneficial properties for both providers, as well as for users of the devices. One of the implications of the paper is that the access points of a 3G services provider have a potential to smooth out the traffic fluctuations within the overcrowded hotspots. Thus the costs of backhaul associated with overprovisioning at hotspots to account for those fluctuations could be reduced. Another implication is that the quality of service that the users will experience can be regulated by pricing the services, which is more efficient when the providers agree on the prices, i.e. within a cooperative framework. The authors demonstrate these implications by performing a simulation study of WiFi vs CDMA/HDR competition.

The authors' future research in this direction will include generalization of the framework for a scenario with more than two wireless service providers, as well as analysis of scenarios with ad hoc relaying between the devices.