Abstract
Ongoing advances in sophisticated mobile computing technologies and wireless communications have propelled substantial research work toward designing and implementing a new breed of mobile communications systems. One of the fundamental design objectives of such systems is to ensure complete roaming ability for the mobile users. In addition, upon handoff events, the mobile users also require to be able to perform renegotiations pertaining to their required quality-of-service (QoS) requirements with the concerned system. In this paper, we envision a fair and dynamic auction-based QoS negotiation scheme to deal with this issue. The envisioned scheme provides the mobile users with the flexibility to dynamically negotiate or renegotiate their preferred service levels with the corresponding service provider. The proposed technique has three crucial design objectives: First, it ensures a high level of fairness among the competing mobile users (each with a specific budget). Second, it ensures efficient utilization of the available network resources. Finally, its auction-based mechanism aims at maximizing the revenue of the service provider. A mathematical analysis is provided to demonstrate that, when the three design goals are taken into account, the resource allocation function that the proposed scheme provides represents a Pareto-optimal solution. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is also verified through extensive simulations.