Enabling crowd-sourced mobile Internet access

Crowd-sourced mobile Internet access services enable mobile users to connect with each other and share their Internet connections. This is a promising solution for addressing users' increasing needs for ubiquitous connectivity and alleviating network congestion. The success of such services heavily depends on users' willingness to contribute their resources. In this paper, we consider a general model for such services, and design a distributed incentive mechanism for encouraging users' participation. This bargaining based scheme ensures that the contribution of user resources, in terms of Internet access bandwidths and battery energy, and the allocation of service capacity, measured in the delivered mobile data, are Pareto efficient and proportionally fair. The numerical results verify that the service always improves users' performance and that these benefits depend on the diversity of the users' resources.

[1]  J. Nash.  THE BARGAINING PROBLEM , 1950, Classics in Game Theory.

[2]  George C. Polyzos,et al.  Controlled Wi-Fi Sharing in Cities: A Decentralized Approach Relying on Indirect Reciprocity , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[3]  Fan Wu,et al.  Incentive-compatible opportunistic routing for wireless networks , 2008, MobiCom '08.

[4]  Paramvir Bahl,et al.  Anatomizing application performance differences on smartphones , 2010, MobiSys '10.

[5]  Mohammad Hadi Afrasiabi,et al.  Pricing strategies for user-provided connectivity services , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[6]  Daniel Pérez Palomar,et al.  A tutorial on decomposition methods for network utility maximization , 2006, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[7]  Nalini Venkatasubramanian,et al.  CrowdMAC: A Crowdsourcing System for Mobile Access , 2012, Middleware.

[8]  John C. S. Lui,et al.  On the Access Pricing and Network Scaling Issues of Wireless Mesh Networks , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[9]  Jörg Widmer,et al.  Survey on Energy Consumption Entities on the Smartphone Platform , 2011, 2011 IEEE 73rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring).

[10]  Arun Venkataramani,et al.  Energy consumption in mobile phones: a measurement study and implications for network applications , 2009, IMC '09.

[11]  Wing Cheong Lau,et al.  An Empirical Study on the Capacity and Performance of 3G Networks , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[12]  Roger B. Myerson,et al.  Game theory - Analysis of Conflict , 1991 .

[13]  J. Walrand,et al.  WiFi access point pricing as a dynamic game , 2006, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[14]  Rute C. Sofia,et al.  User-provided networks: consumer as provider , 2008, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[15]  Feng Qian,et al.  A close examination of performance and power characteristics of 4G LTE networks , 2012, MobiSys '12.

[16]  A. Banerjee.  Convex Analysis and Optimization , 2006 .

[17]  Catherine Rosenberg,et al.  A game theoretic framework for bandwidth allocation and pricing in broadband networks , 2000, TNET.

[18]  Julien Freudiger,et al.  On Wireless Social Community Networks , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications.

[19]  Levente Buttyán,et al.  Stimulating Cooperation in Self-Organizing Mobile Ad Hoc Networks , 2003, Mob. Networks Appl..

[20]  Costas Courcoubetis,et al.  Pricing Communication Networks , 2003 .

[21]  Jon Crowcroft,et al.  Modelling incentives for collaboration in mobile ad hoc networks , 2004, Perform. Evaluation.

[22]  Vijay Erramilli,et al.  Energy Efficient Offloading of 3G Networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems.

[23]  Leandros Tassiulas,et al.  An iterative double auction for mobile data offloading , 2013, 2013 11th International Symposium and Workshops on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt).

[24]  Jon Crowcroft,et al.  Architecting Citywide Ubiquitous Wi-Fi Access , 2007, HotNets.

[25]  Ryoichi Shinkuma,et al.  Bandwidth exchange: an energy conserving incentive mechanism for cooperation , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[26]  George Iosifidis,et al.  Double auction mechanisms for resource allocation in autonomous networks , 2010, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[27]  Costas Courcoubetis,et al.  Pricing communication networks - economics, technology and modelling , 2003, Wiley-Interscience series in systems and optimization.

[28]  Franci Pivec,et al.  Measuring the information society , 2003 .