Incentive mechanism design for mobile data offloading in heterogeneous networks

In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism to motivate WiFi Access Points (APs) to provide data offloading service for the mobile network operator (MNO). Particularly, we propose using both salary and bonus to attract WiFi APs to participate in data offloading. Under the proposed incentive scheme, WiFi APs are rewarded not only based on the amount of offloaded data but also based on the quality of the offloading service. We investigate the interactions between theWiFi APs and the MNO using Stackelberg game. We derive the best response functions for WiFi APs (i.e. the optimal amount of data to offload), and show that pure strategy Nash Equilibrium (NE) always exists for the subgame. Then, given WiFi APs´ strategies, we investigate the optimal strategy (i.e. the optimal salary and the optimal bonus) for the MNO to maximize its utility. It is shown that the proposed incentive mechanism is effective in stimulating WiFi APs to offload more data and provide higher quality of offloading service.