A game-theoretic approach to maximise payoff and customer retention for differentiated services in a heterogeneous network environment

Future networks are being devised with the vision of heterogeneity in which a mobile user/device will be able to connect seamlessly to multiple wireless networks (WLAN, Cellular, WMAN, WPAN) and evolve simultaneously. Coexistence of underlying network is the requirement of telecom industry, which leads to an open competition among the service providers. To survive in the market, telecom operators are investing more in retaining the valuable users rather than acquiring new users. Proposed work introduces the user agent to check the loyalty of user and application preference, and network agent is used to rank network as social, quality, and normal network. The user can also set his preference as social trust, quality trust, and normal trust. A game between user agent and network agent constructs a payoff matrix for loyal user and normal user. Results show seven equilibrium cases for loyal user where user agent and network agent have equal payoff. In case of normal user there is only one case of equilibrium and in the other cases the network agent can maximise his payoff.