On the economics of mobile content pre-staging

Abstract

The explosive demand for data in wireless devices has driven mobile carriers and the research community to seek nearly all intriguing technical and economic solutions to data demand problem. Content pre-staging is the idea to push content as close to the device as possible, either at the network edge or on the device itself in order to reduce bandwidth needs at peak demand times. We posit an interesting twist on this arrangement, namely to explore the economic implications if mobile device storage could be made available either by the user or indirectly by the wireless operator. We model the interplay between the mobile service carrier, the content provider, and end users as a Stackelberg game. Utilizing economic levers, the carrier sets the price for content providers to pre-stage content on mobile device storage, and provides monetary reward to compensate users for the usage of their mobile device storage. Through analyzing the impact of content localization on the economic well-being of all players, we demonstrate the improvement in network efficiency from the social welfare perspective. While the carrier may set prices strategically to retain a larger share of the increased profitability of the business, such practice benefits all the three parties in the game, i.e., users gain QoE and content; the carrier gains in saved capacity and new revenue; and the content provider gains in increased revenue and increased content access.