A Contract-Based Incentive Mechanism for Delayed Traffic Offloading in Cellular Networks

Abstract

Delayed traffic offloading is a promising paradigm to alleviate the cellular network congestion caused by explosive traffic demands. As we all know, in mobile networks, the delay profile for traffic is remarkable due to users’ mobility. How to exploit user delay tolerance to improve the profit of operator as well as mobile users becomes a big challenge. In this paper, we model this delayed offloading process as a monopoly market based on contract theory, where operator acts as the monopolist setting up the optimal contract by statistical information on user satisfaction. We propose an incentive mechanism to motivate users to leverage their delay and price sensitivity in exchange for service cost. To capture the heterogeneity of user satisfaction, we classify users into different types. Each user chooses a proper quality–price contract item according to its type. More specifically, we investigate this delayed offloading scheme under strongly incomplete information scenario, where user type is private information. We derive an optimal contract, which maximizes operator’s profit for both the continuous-user-type model and the discrete-user-type model. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our incentive mechanism for delayed traffic offloading in cellular networks.