Towards a mobile content marketplace

In this paper, we study the possibility of data contents peer-to-peer trading. Motivated by recent findings on proactive resource allocation, we focus on the scenario whereby end-users harness their predictable demands and the possibility of being connected together to pre-cache data contents and resell them in order to minimize their expected payments. The carrier, on the other hand, maximizes its profit by taking a commission from each trade and deploying a dynamic pricing scheme to spread-out the peak load and hence reduce the operational cost. A marketplace based on risk sharing concept is achieved where the tension between carrier and end-users and the competition between end-users themselves is formulated as a Stackelberg game. We compare the new gains with the baseline scenario of flat pricing model that is being employed by most carriers these days. Despite the uncertainty about future demand, and the freshness of proactively downloaded contents, we characterize equilibria point that yield to a win-win situation with respect to the baseline equilibrium. We show that the diversity of users´ activity patterns can be harnessed to minimize their payment and maximize the carrier´s profit.