Economic Analysis of Crowdsourced Wireless Community Networks

TL;DR

This paper provides an economic analysis of crowdsourced wireless community networks, focusing on user behavior and pricing strategies, proposing a partial pricing scheme that significantly boosts operator revenue.

Contribution

It introduces a two-layer Stackelberg model for pricing and user behavior, and designs a partial price differentiation scheme balancing revenue and complexity.

Findings

Partial pricing scheme increases revenue by up to 124.44% over single pricing.

Partial scheme achieves 80% of maximum revenue of complete differentiation.

Model effectively captures user behavior and operator strategies in crowdsourced networks.

Abstract

Crowdsourced wireless community networks can effectively alleviate the limited coverage issue of Wi-Fi access points (APs), by encouraging individuals (users) to share their private residential Wi-Fi APs with others. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive economic analysis for such a crowdsourced network, with the particular focus on the users' behavior analysis and the community network operator's pricing design. Specifically, we formulate the interactions between the network operator and users as a two-layer Stackelberg model, where the operator determining the pricing scheme in Layer I, and then users determining their Wi-Fi sharing schemes in Layer II. First, we analyze the user behavior in Layer II via a two-stage membership selection and network access game, for both small-scale networks and large-scale networks. Then, we design a partial price differentiation scheme for the operator in Layer I, which generalizes both the complete price differentiation scheme and the single pricing scheme (i.e., no price differentiation). We show that the proposed partial pricing scheme can achieve a good tradeoff between the revenue and the implementation complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that when using the partial pricing scheme with only two prices, we can increase the operator's revenue up to 124.44% comparing with the single pricing scheme, and can achieve an average of 80% of the maximum operator revenue under the complete price differentiation scheme.