Incentive framework for mobile data offloading market under QoE‐aware users

Abstract

Mobile data offloading enables the mobile network operator (MNO) to deal with the explosive growth of cellular data by leasing third-party access points (APs) to partially deliver the mobile traffic. This study proposes a novel incentive framework for the mobile data offloading market under QoE-aware users. Considering user satisfaction, the authors formulate the interaction among the MNO, APs, and offloaded users as a three-stage Stackelberg game. Through the Stackelberg game, the APs determine their optimal contributions via the best response method and the offloaded users determine their optimal accepted prices via the proposed dynamic pricing mechanism. Then the MNO makes its decision for profit maximisation. Furthermore, based on contract theory, an optimal dynamic scheme between the MNO and the remaining users is established. Under the dynamic scheme, they prove the personal rationality and incentive compatibility properties. Moreover, the optimisation contract problem is transformed into a relaxed contract problem, and the proposed dynamic algorithm is subsequently used to handle non-feasible solutions. Thus, the proposed framework can improve user satisfaction without affecting MNO profits. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can achieve better performances in terms of user satisfaction and MNO profits compared with traditional algorithms.