4 research outputs found
Economic Viability of Data Trading with Rollover
Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are providing more flexible wireless data
services to attract subscribers and increase revenues. For example, the data
trading market enables user-flexibility by allowing users to sell leftover data
to or buy extra data from each other. The rollover mechanism enables
time-flexibility by allowing a user to utilize his own leftover data from the
previous month in the current month. In this paper, we investigate the economic
viability of offering the data trading market together with the rollover
mechanism, to gain a deeper understanding of the interrelationship between the
user-flexibility and the time-flexibility. We formulate the interactions
between the MNO and mobile users as a multi-slot dynamic game. Specifically, in
each time slot (e.g., every day), the MNO first determines the selling and
buying prices with the goal of revenue maximization, then each user decides his
trading action (by solving a dynamic programming problem) to maximize his
long-term payoff. Due to the availability of monthly data rollover, a user's
daily trading decision corresponds to a dynamic programming problem with two
time scales (i.e., day-to-day and month-to-month). Our analysis reveals an
optimal trading policy with a target interval structure, specified by a
buy-up-to threshold and a sell-down-to threshold in each time slot. Moreover,
we show that the rollover mechanism makes users sell less and buy more data
given the same trading prices, hence it increases the total demand while
decreasing the total supply in the data trading market. Finally, numerical
results based on real-world data unveil that the time-flexible rollover
mechanism plays a positive role in the user-flexible data trading market,
increasing the MNO's revenue by 25% and all users' payoff by 17% on average.Comment: IEEE INFOCOM 201
Spatial Configuration of Agile Wireless Networks with Drone-BSs and User-in-the-loop
Agile networking can reduce over-engineering, costs, and energy waste.
Towards that end, it is vital to exploit all degrees of freedom of wireless
networks efficiently, so that service quality is not sacrificed. In order to
reap the benefits of flexible networking, we propose a spatial network
configuration scheme (SNC), which can result in efficient networking; both from
the perspective of network capacity, and profitability. First, SNC utilizes the
drone-base-stations (drone-BSs) to configure access points. Drone-BSs are
shifting paradigms of heterogeneous wireless networks by providing radically
flexible deployment opportunities. On the other hand, their limited endurance
and potential high cost increase the importance of utilizing drone-BSs
efficiently. Therefore, secondly, user mobility is exploited via
user-in-the-loop (UIL), which aims at influencing users' mobility by offering
incentives. The proposed uncoordinated SNC is a computationally efficient
method, yet, it may be insufficient to exploit the synergy between drone-BSs
and UIL. Hence, we propose joint SNC, which increases the performance gain
along with the computational cost. Finally, semi-joint SNC combines benefits of
joint SNC, with computational efficiency. Numerical results show that
semi-joint SNC is two orders of magnitude times faster than joint SNC, and more
than 15 percent profit can be obtained compared to conventional systems.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication
Exploring Time Flexibility in Wireless Data Plans
Recently, the mobile network operators (MNOs) are exploring more time
flexibility with the rollover data plan, which allows the unused data from the
previous month to be used in the current month. Motivated by this industry
trend, we propose a general framework for designing and optimizing the mobile
data plan with time flexibility. Such a framework includes the traditional data
plan, two existing rollover data plans, and a new credit data plan as special
cases. Under this framework, we formulate a monopoly MNO's optimal data plan
design as a three-stage Stackelberg game: In Stage I, the MNO decides the data
mechanism; In Stage II, the MNO further decides the corresponding data cap,
subscription fee, and the per-unit fee; Finally in Stage III, users make
subscription decisions based on their own characteristics. Through backward
induction, we analytically characterize the MNO's profit-maximizing data plan
and the corresponding users' subscriptions. Furthermore, we conduct a market
survey to estimate the distribution of users' two-dimensional characteristics,
and evaluate the performance of different data mechanisms using the real data.
We find that a more time-flexible data mechanism increases MNO's profit and
users' payoffs, hence improves the social welfare
Duopoly Competition for Mobile Data Plans with Time Flexibility
The growing competition drives the mobile network operators (MNOs) to explore
adding time flexibility to the traditional data plan, which consists of a
monthly subscription fee, a data cap, and a per-unit fee for exceeding the data
cap. The rollover data plan, which allows the unused data of the previous month
to be used in the current month, provides the subscribers with the time
flexibility. In this paper, we formulate two MNOs' market competition as a
three-stage game, where the MNOs decide their data mechanisms (traditional or
rollover) in Stage I and the pricing strategies in Stage II, and then users
make their subscription decisions in Stage III. Different from the monopoly
market where an MNO always prefers the rollover mechanism over the traditional
plan in terms of profit, MNOs may adopt different data mechanisms at an
equilibrium. Specifically, the high-QoS MNO would gradually abandon the
rollover mechanism as its QoS advantage diminishes. Meanwhile, the low-QoS MNO
would progressively upgrade to the rollover mechanism. The numerical results
show that the market competition significantly limits MNOs' profits, but both
MNOs obtain higher profits with the possible choice of the rollover data plan