Evolution and competition, a game theoretical analysis of heterogeneous wireless networks in unlicensed spectrum

Abstract

Wireless community networks (WCNs) are emerging as an alternative to provide wireless offloading before the deployment of 5G network. However, it is not clear about its development prospects, e.g., how to understand the WCN technology affects the adoption of users, and the competition in a communication market coexisting different wireless technologies, i.e., LTE in unlicensed spectrum. To this end, we envision three distinct development stages of WCN: evolution, regulation, and competition. Specially, we first study the evolution of self-organizing WCN in which the WCN services expands as WCN participants increases. We propose a dynamic model and show the existence of unique equilibrium point at which the fraction of subscribers does not change. Next, we turn to investigate the impact of regulation on a commercial WCN by introducing an operator. The users in commercial WCN can be divided into two parts: insiders and outsiders, according to whether contributing connectivity into the community. We discuss the economic interactions with regard to insiders, outsiders, and the operator, and derive the equilibrium adoption of various users and the optimal price of the WCN operator. We then investigate a competitive duopoly market that coexists a WCN provider (WCNP) and an LTE-U provider (LP). We model the economic relationships among the users, WCNP and LP as a tripartite game, in which the two providers choose their market shares independently. We derive a sufficient condition that guarantees the existence of equilibrium in the market competition game.