User Initiated Data Plan Trading via a Personal Hotspot Market
Mobile data services are becoming the main driver of a wireless service provider's (WSPs) revenue growth, and two part tariff data plans (each including a lump sum fee and a per unit charge) are usually provided to wireless users. Some users can easily use up their monthly data quota and may pay for costly data over usage. Motivated by users' diverse usage behavior (more or less than the subscribed data quotas) this paper proposes a new type of user initiated network for cellular users to trade data plans by leveraging personal hotspots (PHs) with users' smartphones. A user with data surplus can set up a PH and share the cellular data connection to another user with data deficit in the vicinity. Due to users' randomness in data usage, incentive to trade, and user mobility to enter or leave the PH connection range, the analysis on the secondary trading market is challenging. To overcome these issues, we propose a PH market for users with diverse data usage behaviors and random user mobility to directly trade data as sellers and buyers, by designing a market clearing price. It is shown that the PH market greatly saves all users' expected costs when the existence condition of the PH market is met. Finally, as this PH market will challenge the WSP's revenue collection (especially the surcharge from users' data over usage) we analyze the WSP's response to the PH market and propose two effective countermeasure strategies by either reducing the selling users' data quota in their data plans (the PH market's supply) or increasing the buying users' data quota (the PH market's demand) When we have more than one WSP and they are competitive, we show that one WSP can take advantage of the PH market by indirectly selling more data to the other WSP's users.
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications