When Network Effect Meets Congestion Effect: Leveraging Social Services for Wireless Services

The recent development of social services tightens wireless users’ social relationships and encourages them to generate more data traffic under network effect. This boosts the demand for wireless services yet may challenge the limited wireless capacity. To fully exploit this opportunity, we study mobile users’ data usage behaviors by jointly considering the network effect based on their social relationships in the social domain and the congestion effect in the physical wireless domain. Accordingly, we develop a Stackelberg game for problem formulation: In Stage I, a wireless provider first decides the data pricing to all users to maximize its revenue, and then in Stage II users observe the price and decide data usage subject to mutual interactions under both network and congestion effects. We analyze the two-stage game using backward induction. For Stage II, we first show the existence and uniqueness of a user demand equilibrium (UDE). Then we propose a distributed update al...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: Xiaowen Gong, Lingjie Duan, Xu Chen
• Keywords: Computer Networks, MOBIHOC 2015