Incentive Mechanisms for Motivating Mobile Data Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks: A Salary-Plus-Bonus Approach

Abstract: In this paper, a salary-plus-bonus incentive mechanism is proposed to motivate WiFi Access Points (APs) to provide data offloading service for mobile network operators (MNOs). Under the proposed salary-plus-bonus scheme, WiFi APs are rewarded not only based on offloaded data volume but also based on the quality of their offloading service. The interactions between WiFi APs and the MNO under this incentive mechanism are then studied using Stackelberg game. By differentiating whether WiFi APs are of the same type (e.g. offloading cost and quality), two cases (homogeneous and heterogeneous) are studied. For both cases, we derive the best response functions for WiFi APs (i.e. the optimal amount of data to offload), and show that the Nash Equilibrium (NE) always exists for the subgame. Then, given WiFi APs' strategies, we investigate the optimal strategy (i.e. the optimal salary and bonus) for the MNO to maximize its utility. Then, two simple incentive mechanisms, referred to as the salary-only scheme and the bonus-only scheme, are presented and studied using Stackelberg game. For both of them, it is shown that the Stackelberg Equilibrium (SE) exists and is unique. We also show that the salary-only scheme is more effective in offloading more data, and the bonus-only scheme is more effective in selecting premium APs (i.e. providing high-quality offloading service at low cost), while the salary-plus-bonus scheme can strike a well balance between the offloaded data volume and the offloading quality.