The widespread adoption of 5G cellular technology will evolve as one of the major drivers for the growth of IoT-based applications. In this paper, we consider a Service Provider (SP) that launches a smart city service based on IoT data readings: in order to serve IoT data collected across different locations, the SP dynamically negotiates and rescales bandwidth and service functions. 5G network slicing functions are key to lease appropriate amount of resources over heterogeneous access technologies and different site types. Also, different infrastructure providers will charge slicing service depending on specific access technology supported across sites and IoT data collection patterns. We introduce a pricing mechanism based on Age of Information (AoI) to reduce the cost of SPs. It provides incentives for devices to smooth traffic by shifting part of the traffic load from highly congested and more expensive locations to lesser charged ones, while meeting QoS requirements of the IoT service. The proposed optimal pricing scheme comprises a two-stage decision process, where the SP determines the pricing of each location and devices schedule uploads of collected data based on the optimal uploading policy. Simulations show that the SP attains consistent cost reductions tuning the trade-off between slicing costs and the AoI of uploaded IoT data.

Network slicing is becoming the platform of choice for several applications and services. Nowadays most applications are virtualized to gain flexibility and portability. With network slicing, operators can create multiple network slices or tenants, which can be used for certain applications with specific requirements. Behind the network slicing, a slice expresses the need to access a precise service type, under a fully qualified set of computing and network requirements. Resource allocation decision encompasses a combination of different resource types (e.g., radio resource, CPU, memory, bandwidth). In this paper, we explore a differential pricing scheme that maximizes social welfare among slices as well as among end-users. To do so, we propose a pricing mechanism that makes fairness at multiple levels: fairness among slices and fairness among slice locations supported by each slice. Therefore, the proposed scheme is beneficial for both the slices and the end-users independent of their location. Additionally, we study the case where slices can manipulate their preferences to improve their utility. We show that the Fisher market game always has a pure Nash equilibrium and we prove Price of Anarchy is $\frac{1}{N}$, where N is the number of slices. Finally, we conduct simulations using Amazon EC2 instances to numerically analyze and compare the performance of the mechanisms and confirm the theoretical properties of the market model.