Share Brings Benefits: Towards Maximizing Revenue for Crowdsourced Mobile Network Access

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Crowdsourced mobile network access (CMNA), in which mobile users can share their Internet access with others, is a promising paradigm for addressing users' increasing needs for ubiquitous connectivity and alleviating cellular network congestion. In this paper, we study the operator-assisted CMNA model, in which a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) incentivizes its subscribers to operate as mobile WiFi hotspots (hosts) through reimbursement and gets revenue from the relayed traffic. Despite of the promising performance, practical strategies for MVNO and hosts have not been studied yet. Existing works usually assume both MVNO and hosts can obtain complete information, and ignore the accompanied overhead in backhaul and privacy threats to users. Such assumptions are unrealistic in practice. To address this issue, we first systematically characterize the revenue loss for both MVNO and hosts with incomplete market information. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel partial cooperation strategy (PCS) to enable appropriate information exchange between MVNO and hosts with little overhead. With adaptive reimbursement and subtle information control, our PCS efficiently improves MVNO's revenue at equilibrium, and also satisfies the hosts' rationality. Through extensive evaluation on data from the real world, we demonstrate our PCS can improve MVNO's revenue by 23% at equilibrium, compared with the results without PCS.