Jeremiah Mutungi, a master’s scholar from the Communications Research Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering, received an award for one of the best three papers at the 19th Annual Southern African Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) held from 4 to 7 September 2016 at Fancourt in George, Western Cape. SATNAC is the continent’s leading information and communications technology (ICT) conference and draws more than 400 delegates every year.
His paper, “A Source-Destination based Dynamic Pricing Scheme to increase Resource Utilization in Mobile Wireless Networks”, was among more than 100 research papers presented at the conference and was judged best paper by an anonymous panel. It presented a novel pricing algorithm for mobile networks, which considers resource utilisation in both the call-originating and the destination cells to compute the dynamic price to be charged for a voice service request. This algorithm makes it possible to offer low calling prices during the under-utilized off-peak periods, therefore incentivising users to increase their resource utilisation. It also reduces congestion during the over-utilised peak periods by encouraging users to time shift their non-sensitive traffic to off peak periods.
Mutungi co-authored the paper with his supervisor, Associate Professor Falowo.
