Efficient and Fair Collaborative Mobile Internet Access

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed incentive mechanism for user-provided networks (UPNs) that encourages user participation and improves network performance by fairly allocating resources, resulting in significant traffic increases.

Contribution

It introduces a novel bargaining-based framework and incentive mechanism for UPNs that maximizes data rates and ensures fair resource sharing among heterogeneous users.

Findings

Service can improve performance by up to 30% in typical scenarios.

Performance gains increase with user resource diversity.

Mechanism effectively incentivizes user contribution.

Abstract

The surging global mobile data traffic challenges the economic viability of cellular networks and calls for innovative solutions to reduce the network congestion and improve user experience. In this context, user-provided networks (UPNs), where mobile users share their Internet access by exploiting their diverse network resources and needs, turn out to be very promising. Heterogeneous users with advanced handheld devices can form connections in a distributed fashion and unleash dormant network resources at the network edge. However, the success of such services heavily depends on users' willingness to contribute their resources, such as network access and device battery energy. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for UPN services and design a bargaining-based distributed incentive mechanism to ensure users participation. The proposed mechanism determines the resources that each user should contribute in order to maximise the aggregate data rate in UPN, and fairly allocate the benefit among the users. The numerical results verify that the service can always improve performance, and such improvement increases with the diversity of the users' resources. Quantitatively, it can reach an average 30% increase of the total served traffic for a typical scenario even with only 6 mobile users.