Economics of WiFi Offloading: Trading Delay for Cellular Capacity

Cellular networks are facing severe traffic overloads due to the proliferation of smart handheld devices and traffic-hungry applications. A cost-effective and practical solution is to offload cellular data through WiFi. Recent theoretical and experimental studies show that a scheme, referred to as d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on wireless communications 2014-03, Vol.13 (3), p.1540-1554
Main Authors: Lee, Joohyun, Yi, Yung, Chong, Song, Jin, Youngmi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Business and industry local networks
Cellular communication
Cost engineering
Delay
delayed offloading
Delays
economic analysis
Economics
Equipments and installations
Exact sciences and technology
Games
IEEE 802.11 Standards
Mathematical models
Mobile communication
Mobile radiocommunication systems
Networks and services in france and abroad
Numerical analysis
Numerical models
Pricing
Radiocommunications
stackelberg game
Systems, networks and services of telecommunications
Telecommunications
Telecommunications and information theory
Teleprocessing networks. Isdn
Traffic management
Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments)
WiFi offloading
Wireless communication
Wireless networks
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Summary:Cellular networks are facing severe traffic overloads due to the proliferation of smart handheld devices and traffic-hungry applications. A cost-effective and practical solution is to offload cellular data through WiFi. Recent theoretical and experimental studies show that a scheme, referred to as delayed WiFi offloading, can significantly save the cellular capacity by delaying users' data and exploiting mobility and thus increasing chance of meeting WiFi APs (Access Points). Despite a huge potential of WiFi offloading in alleviating mobile data explosion, its success largely depends on the economic incentives provided to users and operators to deploy and use delayed offloading. In this paper, we study how much economic benefits can be generated due to delayed WiFi offloading, by modeling the interaction between a single provider and users based on a two-stage sequential game. We first analytically prove that WiFi offloading is economically beneficial for both the provider and users. Also, we conduct trace-driven numerical analysis to quantify the practical gain, where the increase ranges from 21% to 152% in the providers revenue, and from 73% to 319% in the users surplus.
ISSN:1536-1276
1558-2248
DOI:10.1109/TWC.2014.010214.130949