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Travel with Your Mobile Data Plan: A Location-Flexible Data Service

  • Zhiyuan Wang
  • , Lin Gao
  • , Jianwei Huang
  • Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) provide wireless data services based on a tariff data plan with a month data cap. Traditionally, the data cap is only valid for domestic data consumption and users have to pay extra roaming fees for overseas data consumption. A recent location-flexible service allows the user to access the domestic data cap in overseas locations (by configuring location-flexibility with a daily fee). This paper studies the economic effect of the location-flexibility on the overseas market. The overseas market comprises users who travel overseas within the month, thus is monthly variant. Each user decides his joint flexibility configuration and data consumption (J-FCDC) every day. The user's J-FCDC problem is an on-line payoff maximization. We analyze its off-line problem (which is NP-hard) and design an on-line strategy with provable performance. Moreover, we propose a pricing policy for the location-flexible service without relying on the market statistic information. We find that the location-flexibility induces users to consume more data in low-valuation days, and the MNO benefits from stimulating users' data consumption through an appropriate pricing. Numerical results based on empirical data show that the location-flexibility improves the MNO's revenue by 18% and the users' payoffs by 12% on average.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationINFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1738-1747
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728164120
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event38th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2020 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 6 Jul 20209 Jul 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
Volume2020-July
ISSN (Print)0743-166X

Conference

Conference38th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2020
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period6/07/209/07/20

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