Pricing and Service Provision in 5G Networks

With the development of wireless network technologies, the number of mobile devices (MDs), such as smartphones and wearable devices, is growing at an unprecedented rate. In the 5G networks, mobile devices obtain wireless network services from the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) by signing contracts. Generally speaking, there are usually more than one ISP in the network service market. Therefore, mobile users (MUs) face the difficulty of selecting network services from these ISPs. In this paper, we consider a network service market with MUs selecting network services from one ISP who prices are set differently for different MUs. We model the interaction between the ISP and MUs as a Stackelberg game, under which the prices of the network service of the ISP are firstly determined, and the MUs make decisions based on the network service prices. We applied the backward induction way to prove the unique existence of the equilibrium. Simulation results are provided to show the analysis results.