UC Irvine

Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) has been the predominant mobile network access scheme during the past decade. OMA ensures that the signals of all users are orthogonal to one another across time and/or frequency. Limitation on the number of orthogonal signals and exponential increase in new users, have made Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) as a suitable network access technique for 6G and beyond. Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS) are empirical measurements of the service provided to the user by any mobile communication schemes. The ensemble of content-rich services provided through wireless networks have varying QoE specifications. Therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop a step-by-step standardization to quantify the user satisfaction.

This issue is addressed by developing a novel economic approach to meet the QoE demands of the customers in NOMA networks. In the preliminary study, a new pricing framework called Smart Media Pricing (SMP) was developed to price the customer based on the quality of multimedia data purchased. The study proved to be successful and results indicated a significant QoE boost. The study was then extended to NOMA networks. We first developed a new pricing scheme for NOMA called NOMAPricing (NOMAP). Game-theoretic methods were leveraged to show that the NOMAP framework benefits both the service provider and the mobile customer. The short-comings of measuring the user QoE using Expected Utility Theory (EUT) were then addressed by adopting postulates from prospect theory.

In NOMA, the service provider superimposes the data of all users and transmits them simultaneously. The user devices segregate their content from the amalgamated signal and discards the rest. In a device-to-device (D2D) communication enabled NOMA network, the user can retransmit the data of other customers before discarding them. NOMAP model was ameliorated with conjunction of auction-theoretic solutions to incentivize and promote data relaying. Finally, although NOMA has several merits than the de-facto standard OMA, the switch from OMA to NOMA would be phased out. NOMAP model was tweaked as Orthogonal-Centric Pricing (OCP) to improve customer QoE in a NOMO-OMA hybrid network. The model also promotes users to shift data from OMA to NOMA to offload the service providers.

In this dissertation, we present the utility definitions for the above mentioned models. Optimization solutions for the models derived from game theory, prospect theory, and auction theory are discussed and implementation references are provided. Numerical simulations were also carried out and the results showcase the merits of QoE based pricing models for next-generation mobile networks.