The Optimality of Two Prices: Maximizing Revenue in a Stochastic Network

SPEAKER: Mr. Longbo Huang, PhD Candidate, USCABSTRACT: This paper considers the problem of pricing and transmission scheduling for an Access Point (AP) in a wireless mesh network, where the AP provides services to a set of mobile users. The goal of the AP is to maximize its own time-average profit. We first obtain the optimum time-average profit of
the AP and prove the "Optimality of Two Prices" Theorem. We then develop an online scheme that jointly solves the pricing and transmission scheduling problem in a dynamic environment. The scheme uses an admission price and a business decision as tools to regulate the incoming traffic and to maximize revenue. We show the scheme can achieve any average profit that is arbitrarily close to the optimum, with a tradeoff in average delay. This holds for general Markovian dynamics for channel and user state variation, and does not require a-priori knowledge of the Markov model.BIO: Longbo Huang received his B.E. and M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sun Yet-sen University, China, in 2003 and Columbia University in 2004, respectively. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree at USC. His research interests are in the areas of queueing theory and stochastic network optimization.Host: Prof. Michael Neely

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher