TY - GEN
T1 - Cooperative and competitive operator pricing for mobile crowdsourced internet access
AU - Zhang, Meng
AU - Gao, Lin
AU - Huang, Jianwei
AU - Honig, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the General Research Funds (Project Number CUHK 14202814, 14206315, 14219016, and AoE/E-02/08) established under the University Grant Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, US NSF Grant AST-134338, and the Institute for Network Coding at CUHK.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/10/2
Y1 - 2017/10/2
N2 - Mobile Crowdsourced Access (MCA) enables mobile users (MUs) to share their Internet connections by serving as tethers to other MUs, hence can improve the quality of service of MUs as well as the overall utilization of network resources. However, MCA can also reduce the revenue-generating mobile traffic and increase the network congestion for mobile network operators (MNOs), and thus has been blocked by some MNOs in practice. In this work, we reconcile the conflicting objectives of MNOs and MUs by introducing a pricing framework for MCA, where the direct traffic and tethering traffic are charged independently according to a data price and a tethering price, respectively. We derive the optimal data and tethering prices systematically for MUs with the α-fair utility in two scenarios with cooperative and competitive MNOs, respectively. We show that the optimal tethering prices are zero and the optimal usage-based data prices are identical for all MUs, in both the cooperative and competitive scenarios. Such optimal pricing schemes will lead to mutually beneficial results for MNOs and MUs. Our simulation results show that the proposed pricing scheme approximately triples both the MNOs' profit and the MUs' payoff when the MNOs cooperate, comparing to the case where MCA is blocked. Moreover, competition among MNOs will decrease MNOs' profit and further increase the MUs' payoff.
AB - Mobile Crowdsourced Access (MCA) enables mobile users (MUs) to share their Internet connections by serving as tethers to other MUs, hence can improve the quality of service of MUs as well as the overall utilization of network resources. However, MCA can also reduce the revenue-generating mobile traffic and increase the network congestion for mobile network operators (MNOs), and thus has been blocked by some MNOs in practice. In this work, we reconcile the conflicting objectives of MNOs and MUs by introducing a pricing framework for MCA, where the direct traffic and tethering traffic are charged independently according to a data price and a tethering price, respectively. We derive the optimal data and tethering prices systematically for MUs with the α-fair utility in two scenarios with cooperative and competitive MNOs, respectively. We show that the optimal tethering prices are zero and the optimal usage-based data prices are identical for all MUs, in both the cooperative and competitive scenarios. Such optimal pricing schemes will lead to mutually beneficial results for MNOs and MUs. Our simulation results show that the proposed pricing scheme approximately triples both the MNOs' profit and the MUs' payoff when the MNOs cooperate, comparing to the case where MCA is blocked. Moreover, competition among MNOs will decrease MNOs' profit and further increase the MUs' payoff.
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U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2017.8057044
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2017.8057044
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85018771167
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
BT - INFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2017
Y2 - 1 May 2017 through 4 May 2017
ER -