A Pricing-Aware Resource Scheduling Framework for LTE Networks

Long term evolution (LTE) is a standard widely used in cellular networks today. Both resource scheduling and pricing are two critical issues. However, existing studies address them separately, making the goals of improving system performance and increasing operator revenue conflicting. This paper proposes a pricing-aware resource scheduling (PARS) framework to conquer this conflict. It classifies users into three levels and has scheduling and pricing modules, which are installed in a base station and the core network of LTE, respectively. The scheduling module uses three-layer schedulers to assign resource to a flow by considering its packet delay, traffic amount, channel condition, and user level. The pricing module uses price elasticity of demand in economics to adaptively adjust the amount of money charged to users. Through experiments by LTE-Sim, we show that PARS achieves a good balance between performance and revenue, and provides quality of service for the flows with strict delay concerns.