Motivations of Hybrid Wireless Community Participants: A Qualitative Analysis of Swiss FON Members

IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking

et al. 2018

Crowdsourced wireless community network enables individual users to share their private Wi-Fi access points (APs) with each other, hence can achieve a large Wi-Fi coverage with a small deployment cost via crowdsourcing. This paper presents a novel contract-based incentive framework to incentivize such a Wi-Fi network crowdsourcing under incomplete information (where each user has certain private information such as mobility pattern and Wi-Fi access quality). In the proposed framework, the network operator designs and offers a set of contract items to users, each consisting of a Wi-Fi access price (that a user can charge others for accessing his AP) and a subscription fee (that a user needs to pay the operator for joining the community). Different from the existing contracts in the literature, in our contract model each user's best choice depends not only on his private information but also on other users' choices. This greatly complicates the contract design, as the operator needs to analyze the equilibrium choices of all users, rather than the best choice of each single user. We first derive the feasible contract that guarantees the users' truthful information disclosure based on the equilibrium analysis of user choice, and then derive the optimal (and feasible) contract that yields the maximal profit for the operator. Our analysis shows that a user who provides a higher Wi-Fi access quality is more likely to choose a higher Wi-Fi access price and subscription fee, regardless of the user mobility pattern. Simulation results further show that when increasing the average Wi-Fi access quality of users, the operator can gain more profit, but (counter-intuitively) offer lower Wi-Fi access prices and subscription fees for users.

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incentivizing Wi-Fi Network Crowdsourcing: A Contract Theoretic Approach

IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking

et al. 2018

“…There are several closely related studies in wireless community networks, regarding incentive issues [11], the network expansion and interactions with traditional ISP [12], [13], and the pricing mechanism design [14], [15]. Camponovo et al in [11] concluded based on surveys that getting free Internet access from other members and revenue sharing are the two main incentives for users to join the FON network in Switzerland.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Camponovo et al in [11] concluded based on surveys that getting free Internet access from other members and revenue sharing are the two main incentives for users to join the FON network in Switzerland. Manshaei et al in [12] modeled a user's payoff as a function of the subscription fee and network coverage, and studied the evolution dynamics of wireless community networks.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic Analysis of Crowdsourced Wireless Community Networks

IEEE Trans. on Mobile Comput.

et al. 2017

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.

“…That is, the game player set in the Network Access Game on AP k is K(k) = M(k) {i}. For more clarity, let us rewrite the equilibrium payoff of subscriber i on AP k, i.e., v i,k (σ i,k , σ −i,k ) defined in (5), as v i,k (σ i,k , σ −i,k |M(k)), when competing with a set M(k) of other users (in the Network Access Game on AP k). Hence, the expected payoff of subscriber i on AP k is…”

Section: B Payoff Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A game-theoretic analysis of user behaviors in crowdsourced wireless community networks

2015 13th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt)

et al. 2015

A crowdsourced wireless community network 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 each other. This paper presents the first study on the users' joint membership selection and network access problem in such a network. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a two-stage dynamic game: Stage I corresponds to a membership selection game, in which each user chooses his membership type; Stage II corresponds to a set of network access games, in each of which each user decides his WiFi connection time on the AP at his current location. We analyze the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium (SPE) systematically, and study whether and how best response dynamics can reach the equilibrium. Through numerical studies, we further explore how the equilibrium changes with the users' mobility patterns and network access evaluations. We show that a user with a more popular home location, a smaller travel time, or a smaller network access evaluation is more likely to choose a specific type of membership called Bill. We further demonstrate how the network operator can optimize its pricing and incentive mechanism based on the game equilibrium analysis in this work.