Abstract

The fast growing mobile data demands and the proliferation of advanced mobile devices lead to the emergence of user-provided networks (UPNs), which improve user experiences by exploiting the diverse communication needs and resources of different users. The success of UPNs, however, relies on carefully designed incentive mechanisms that effectively encourage voluntary participation and cooperation of users. Motivated by recently launched UPN business models, in this talk we will introduce two new mobile UPN incentive mechanisms that take users’ energy consumption and data usage costs into consideration. The first one is motivated by the social bandwidth trading scheme pioneered by Karma (https://yourkarma.com/), and we design an optimal hybrid pricing scheme that combines usage-based data pricing and quota reimbursement for network-assisted mobile UPNs. The second one is motivated by the crowd-sourced Internet connectivity enabled by OpenGarden (https://opengarden.com/), and we design a virtual currency based scheme that incentivizes cooperation in autonomous mobile UPNs. This is a joint work with Lin Gao from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and George Iosifidis and Leandros Tassiulas from Yale University.