A Survey of Smart Data Pricing: Past Proposals, Current Plans, and Future Trends

TL;DR

This survey reviews the evolution of broadband data pricing from flat-rate plans to dynamic schemes, highlighting past proposals, current implementations, and future research directions in network economics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of historical and current broadband pricing models and discusses open research challenges and trends for future development.

Findings

Dynamic pricing schemes are increasingly adopted worldwide.

There are significant research challenges in designing efficient data pricing models.

Future trends include personalized and context-aware pricing strategies.

Abstract

Traditionally, network operators have used simple flat-rate broadband data plans for both wired and wireless network access. But today, with the popularity of mobile devices and exponential growth of apps, videos, and clouds, service providers are gradually moving towards more sophisticated pricing schemes. This decade will therefore likely witness a major change in the ways in which network resources are managed, and the role of economics in allocating these resources. This survey reviews some of the well-known past broadband pricing proposals (both static and dynamic), including their current realizations in various consumer data plans around the world, and discusses several research problems and open questions. By exploring the benefits and challenges of pricing data, this paper attempts to facilitate both the industrial and the academic communities' efforts in understanding the existing literature, recognizing new trends, and shaping an appropriate and timely research agenda.