Tiered Licensed-Assisted Access with Paid Prioritization: A Game Theoretic Approach for Unlicensed LTE

The network congestion is caused by the rapidly growing data traffic and the limited wireless radio resources. In addition to the licensed spectrum, the access to unlicensed spectrum (e.g., LAA) brings hope for the service provider (SP) to mitigate the deficiency of radio resources. The premium peering deal with the content providers (CPs) can be an approach to efficiently allocate the scarce radio resources to the CPs with higher traffic load and QoS requirement. This work contributes to a content premium pricing framework for one SP and several CPs, where the SP possesses both LTE and LAA. Through the four-stage Stackelberg game, job market signaling game and second price auction, we derive the optimal bandwidth demand of each CP, the optimal amounts of licensed bandwidth and unlicensed bandwidth required by the SP, the premium access fee and basic access fee. Analysis shows that the CPs and the SP all benefit from the premium access deal. Furthermore, there is a tradeoff between improvement and variability of the SP’s profit when introducing LAA.