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Incentive design and market evolution of mobile user-provided networks

Khalili, M. M ; Sharif University of Technology | 2015

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  1. Type of Document: Article
  2. DOI: 10.1109/INFCOMW.2015.7179434
  3. Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc , 2015
  4. Abstract:
  5. An operator-assisted user-provided network (UPN) has the potential to achieve a low cost ubiquitous Internet connectivity, without significantly increasing the network infrastructure investment. In this paper, we consider such a network where the network operator encourages some of her subscribers to operate as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots (hosts), providing Internet connectivity for other subscribers (clients). We formulate the interaction between the operator and mobile users as a two-stage game. In Stage I, the operator determines the usage-based pricing and quota-based incentive mechanism for the data usage. In Stage II, the mobile users make their decisions about whether to be a host, or a client, or not a subscriber at all. We characterize how the users' membership choices will affect each other's payoffs in Stage II, and how the operator optimizes her decision in Stage I to maximize her profit. Our theoretical and numerical results show that the operator's maximum profit increases with the user density, and the profit gain can be up to 50% in a dense network comparing with a pricing-only approach with no incentives
  6. Keywords:
  7. Costs ; Economics ; Internet ; Investments ; Profitability ; Incentive design ; Incentive mechanism ; Internet connectivity ; Market evolution ; Network infrastructure ; Network operator ; Numerical results ; Two stage games ; Wi-Fi
  8. Source: Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM, 26 April 2015 through 1 May 2015 ; Volume 2015-August , 2015 , Pages 498-503 ; 0743166X (ISSN) ; 9781467371315 (ISBN)
  9. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7179434