Optimal Smart Prepayment for Mobile Access Service via Stackelberg Game

In this paper we propose a smart prepayment for mobile access network Service Provider (SP) to charge End-Users (EUs). Prepayment is a desirable charging approach, since it helps the SP to reduce its loss in bad-debt and capital devaluation. Meanwhile, Quality of Service (QoS) is a major concern from the EUs’ perspective, especially when they have heavy traffic demands and suffer from network congestion due to limited access bandwidths. Our proposed prepayment thus aims at improving both the SP’s economic reward and the EUs’ QoS. To analyze the benefit from the proposed prepayment scheme, we model the interaction between the SP and the EUs as a Stackelberg game, which is based on the rationale that improved QoS will be an incentive for the EUs to prepay. In this game model, the SP plays as a leader and determines its prepayment policy to optimize its reward, and the EU plays as a game follower and determines its prepaid amount as a response to the SP’s policy. The equilibrium of this game model strongly depends on the EUs’ traffic load level, which we quantify and analyze in depth. Our results show that both of the SP and the EUs can benefit from the equilibrium of the game model, implying that the proposed prepayment scheme will yield a desirable win-win outcome.