Social-Enabled Data Offloading via Mobile Participation - A Game-Theoretical Approach

The exploding popularity of mobile devices enables people to enjoy benefits brought by various interesting mobile apps, such as social networking, mobile video services, and location-based services, etc. However, the ever-increasing data traffic has exacerbated congestions on current cellular networks, which results in users' dissatisfaction, especially in crowded areas. Hence, how to deal with the explosive data traffic in cellular networks becomes a challenging problem. Traditional methods rely on mobile offloading techniques to deviate the data traffic targeted to cellular networks, such as small cell, Wi-Fi, and opportunistic communication. Unfortunately, mobile users will still experience severe congestion when a large number of users request for data. Facing these challenges, we introduce the concept of mobile participation to assist data offloading by leveraging the mobility of mobile users and the social features among a group of users. A mobile caching user, who pre- caches certain amount of contents, can roam around congested areas to participate in data dissemination in order to satisfy users' requests, which can benefit both herself and users in the crowd simultaneously. Therefore, we propose a game theoretical approach to analyze the data offloading via mobile participation with joint considerations on network effects, congestion, social behaviors, and pricing strategy. Based on detailed performance analysis, we show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach.