TY - GEN
T1 - The Impact of Bundling Licensed and Unlicensed Wireless Service
AU - Wang, Xu
AU - Berry, Randall A.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by NSF grants AST-1343381, AST-1547328 and CNS-1701921.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/10/8
Y1 - 2018/10/8
N2 - Unlicensed spectrum has been viewed as a way to increase competition in wireless access and promote innovation in new technologies and business models. However, several recent papers have shown that the openness of such spectrum can also lead to it becoming over congested when used by competing wireless service providers (SPs). This in turn can result in the SPs making no profit and may deter them from entering the market. However, this prior work assumes that unlicensed access is a separate service from any service offered using licensed spectrum. Here, we instead consider the more common case were service providers bundle both licensed and unlicensed spectrum as a single service and offer this with a single price. We analyze a model for such a market and show that in this case SPs are able to gain higher profit than the case without bundling. It is also possible to get higher social welfare with bundling. Moreover, we explore the case where SPs are allowed to manage the customers' average percentage of time they receive service on unlicensed spectrum and characterize the social welfare gap between the profit maximizing and social welfare maximizing setting.
AB - Unlicensed spectrum has been viewed as a way to increase competition in wireless access and promote innovation in new technologies and business models. However, several recent papers have shown that the openness of such spectrum can also lead to it becoming over congested when used by competing wireless service providers (SPs). This in turn can result in the SPs making no profit and may deter them from entering the market. However, this prior work assumes that unlicensed access is a separate service from any service offered using licensed spectrum. Here, we instead consider the more common case were service providers bundle both licensed and unlicensed spectrum as a single service and offer this with a single price. We analyze a model for such a market and show that in this case SPs are able to gain higher profit than the case without bundling. It is also possible to get higher social welfare with bundling. Moreover, we explore the case where SPs are allowed to manage the customers' average percentage of time they receive service on unlicensed spectrum and characterize the social welfare gap between the profit maximizing and social welfare maximizing setting.
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U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8485852
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8485852
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85056173935
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
SP - 1394
EP - 1402
BT - INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2018
Y2 - 15 April 2018 through 19 April 2018
ER -