Time and Location Aware Mobile Data Pricing
Qian Ma, Ya-Feng Liu, and Jianwei Huang

TL;DR
This paper proposes an optimal time and location aware mobile data pricing scheme that incentivizes traffic smoothing, reduces network congestion, and benefits both operators and users, supported by bilevel optimization and simulation results.
Contribution
It introduces a bilevel optimization framework for designing dynamic pricing schemes considering user utility and network costs, with efficient algorithms for common utility functions.
Findings
Operator cost reduction up to 98.7%
User payoff increase up to 106%
Significant discounts at less crowded times and locations
Abstract
Mobile users' correlated mobility and data consumption patterns often lead to severe cellular network congestion in peak hours and hot spots. This paper presents an optimal design of time and location aware mobile data pricing, which incentivizes users to smooth traffic and reduce network congestion. We derive the optimal pricing scheme through analyzing a two-stage decision process, where the operator determines the time and location aware prices by minimizing his total cost in Stage I, and each mobile user schedules his mobile traffic by maximizing his payoff (i.e., utility minus payment) in Stage II. We formulate the two-stage decision problem as a bilevel optimization problem, and propose a derivative-free algorithm to solve the problem for any increasing concave user utility functions. We further develop low complexity algorithms for the commonly used logarithmic and linear utility…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced MIMO Systems Optimization · Advanced Wireless Network Optimization · Wireless Communication Networks Research
