Applications of Economic and Pricing Models for Resource Management in 5G Wireless Networks: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how economic and pricing models are applied to manage resources effectively in 5G wireless networks, addressing challenges posed by multiple stakeholders and emerging technologies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of economic and pricing strategies used for resource management in 5G, highlighting recent developments and future research directions.

Findings

Economic models improve resource allocation efficiency.

Pricing strategies facilitate stakeholder objectives.

Identifies open issues in applying economic models to 5G.

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of economic and pricing theory for resource management in the evolving fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. The 5G wireless networks are envisioned to overcome existing limitations of cellular networks in terms of data rate, capacity, latency, energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, coverage, reliability, and cost per information transfer. To achieve the goals, the 5G systems will adopt emerging technologies such as massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), mmWave communications, and dense Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). However, 5G involves multiple entities and stakeholders that may have different objectives, e.g., high data rate, low latency, utility maximization, and revenue/profit maximization. This poses a number of challenges to resource management designs of 5G. While the traditional solutions may neither efficient nor applicable, economic and pricing models have been recently developed and adopted as useful tools to achieve the objectives. In this paper, we review economic and pricing approaches proposed to address resource management issues in the 5G wireless networks including user association, spectrum allocation, and interference and power management. Furthermore, we present applications of economic and pricing models for wireless caching and mobile data offloading. Finally, we highlight important challenges, open issues and future research directions of applying economic and pricing models to the 5G wireless networks.