MobPrice: Dynamic Data Pricing for Mobile Communication

Abstract

In mobile communication, mobile services [MSs] (e.g., phone calls, short/multimedia messages, and Internet data) incur a cost to both mobile users (MUs) and mobile service providers (MSPs). The proposed model MobPrice consists of dynamic data pricing schemes for mobile communication in order to achieve optimal usage of MSs at minimal prices. MobPrice inspires MUs to subscribe MSs with flexibility of data sharing and intra-peer exchanges, thereby reducing overall cost. The main contributions of MobPrice are three-fold. First, it proposes a novel k-level data-pricing (kDP) scheme for MSs. Second, it extends the kDP scheme with the notion of service-sharing-based pricing schemes to a collaborative peer-to-peer data-pricing (pDP) scheme and a cluster-based data-pricing (cDP) scheme to incorporate the notion of ‘cluster’ (made up of two or more MUs) in mobile communication. Third, our performance study shows that the proposed schemes are indeed effective in maximizing MS subscriptions and minimizing MS’s price/user.