Convex Optimization
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
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As the number of wireless service providers increases, competition among them is becoming stronger in wireless access networks. On the other hand, users actively change their behaviors toward the networks to get more network resources such as service time, bandwidth, capacity, etc. That is, each user will actively choose a cell or a network that offers the largest amount of resources with the lowest cost. In these environments, service providers have to consider not only technical factors but also economical factors such as revenue and user price. By controlling the pricing policy, a service provider can recruit or refuse users that are trying to associate with. In this paper, we first model the resource purchasing and pricing game scheme that takes not only revenue of a service provider but also user satisfaction into account. Assuming selfish behaviors, solution is derived using game theoretic approach. The solution produces the integrated purchasing and pricing scheme that shows cell breathing effect. We extend the model to multicell environments where a user has freedom to choose its service provider. As a user actively changes its weight of the utility function and chooses a cell to associate with, overall performance can be improved. We demonstrate the effect of load balancing with the pricing policy, and the performance improvement compared to a conventional method of association via simulation.