Pricing VoWLAN Services through a Micro-economic Framework

This article investigates the issue of determining an appropriate pricing strategy for voice over WLAN provisioning. This is performed by first framing the voice services in a tunable QoS scenario. The analysis is then performed with the awareness that in a WLAN system the tariff payment determines price-based access regulation, which implies a different service perception because of the modified network conditions. For this reason, we apply a micro-economic frame-work that considers the trade-off between perceived QoS and paid price in the users' request (i.e., including in a tunable way both service requirements and willingness to pay). This allows us to investigate the provider's task of having a suitable price policy, both identifying the subsequently involved trade-offs and providing insight on how to efficiently cut them. © 2006 IEEE.