Policy-based pricing for heterogeneous wireless access networks

Our cities are already covered by a myriad of diverse wireless access networks. The most ubiquitous access networks are the well organized homogeneous and centralized operator-based cellular networks that sustain their business model on a captive client basis. However, a new billing paradigm is rising, where a client can choose to connect to the provider that best comply with his/her current requirements and context. Inside this paradigm, this paper presents a distributed, rule-based pricing strategy aimed to improve the quality of service and to increase the global income of a service provider. The performance and reliability of the rule-based decisions is supported by a Finite State Transducersbased inference machine specially designed to manage networking systems. We show, with simulations, that, using our strategy, the operators can make the new billing paradigm profitable while the clients benefit from the economic advantages of competition and of the quality given by a pricing–based network balance mechanism