Pricing and revenue sharing mechanism for secondary redistribution of data service for mobile devices

Abstract

Cellular Network Providers (CNP) provide users with wireless data access to meet the growing ubiquitous demand for the Internet. As users subscribe to a fixed data plan for a monthly flat fee, some users may exhaust their data allowance before the end of the billing cycle, while others underutilize their monthly quota. To take advantage of such underutilization, Khausik et. al. propose a mechanism for ad hoc bandwidth redistribution that allows subscribers to sell their unused bandwidth to users needing Internet access in exchange for some financial compensation as and when opportunities arise. There exists a popular belief that allowing such on-demand ad hoc service is not beneficial to CNP. This paper seeks to address and counter this opinion by proposing a pricing scheme and a revenue sharing mechanism that makes the provision of ad hoc connection advantageous to CNP. Our revenue sharing mechanism provides economic incentives to CNP. The simulation results show that our revenue sharing model ensures that CNP receives the majority portion of the revenue gained, regardless of the amount. Secondly, our pricing model ensures traffic from ad hoc users has minimal impact on the connection quality of current subscribers. In this model, we use Shapley value as the basis for deriving the revenue sharing.