  Telecommunication service providers deploy UAVs to provide flying network
access in remote rural areas, disaster-affected areas or massive-attended
events (sport venues, festivals, etc.) where full set-up to provide temporary
wireless coverage would be very expensive. Of course, a UAV is battery-powered
which means limited energy budget for both mobility aspect and communication
aspect. An efficient solution is to allow UAVs switching their radio modules to
sleep mode in order to extend battery lifetime. This results in temporary
unavailability of communication feature. Within such a situation, the ultimate
deal for a UAV operator is to provide a cost effective service with acceptable
availability. This would allow to meet some target Quality of Service while
having a good market share granting satisfactory benefits. We construct a
duopoly model to capture the adversarial behavior of service providers in terms
of their pricing policies and their respective availability probabilities.
Optimal periodic beaconing (small messages advertising existence of a UAV) is a
vital issue that needs to be addressed, given the UAVs limited battery capacity
and their recharging constraints. A full analysis of the game outcome, both in
terms of equilibrium pricing and equilibrium availability, is derived. We show
that the availability-pricing game exhibits some nice features as it is
sub-modular with respect to the availability policy, whereas it is
super-modular with respect to the service fee. Furthermore, we implement a
learning scheme using best-response dynamics that allows operators to learn
their joint pricing-availability strategies in a fast, accurate and distributed
fashion.
