On the economic sustainability of supplying bandwidth policies in multi-layer wireless cognitive networks

• State of art on Inventory Management (IM) techniques for telecommunication settings.
• NewsVendor model for supplying bandwidth in Multilayer Wireless Cognitive Network.
• Economical sustainability of NewsVendor model compared to adaptive period IM policy.
• Sensitivity analysis on total number of users and their distribution.

Nowadays, advanced inventory management policies guarantee cost reductions and higher service levels, making them very attractive for modern and challenging communication scenarios such as those related to Multi-layer Wireless Cognitive Networks (MWCNs). In these systems, the radio resources can be considered extremely perishable “commodities” with a short-term lifetime. After describing the latest state of the art on this topic, the novelty of the paper is in being the first to adapt the NewsVendor model from Logistics in order to guarantee a cost-effective bandwidth provisioning in MWCNs. Then, we study the economic sustainability of the proposed approach compared to the one based on the adaptive period inventory management policy, already presented in the literature. Numerical results show that the NewsVendor model outperforms the adaptive period inventory management policy in all the cases under investigation. It provides decision makers with more stable supply solutions by taking into consideration both the randomness of the bandwidth requirements and its short-term lifetime. In addition, it also improves both the total profit and user satisfaction levels.