Incentive Mechanism Design For Crowdsourced WIFI Community Network

Nowadays,people's demand for mobile networks is gradually increasing,and the global mobile data traffic shows an explosive growth trend.However,the global cellular network capacity growth rate is far less than the rate of data traffic growth.To this end,WiFi network,as a complementary network of cellular networks in wireless data transmission,is becoming increasingly important.Due to the limited coverage of a single WiFi access point(AP),which is typically tens of meters indoors and hundreds of meters outdoors,the deployment of a large WiFi network that covers a wide area(such as a city or nation)is often challenging and expensive.Therefore,crowdsourced WiFi network is emerging as a promising paradigm for large WiFi coverage.The key idea of crowdsourcing WiFi community network is that users share their home hotspots with others in the network,and as compensations,he can also use the hotspots of other users in the network when roaming,hence forming a community network.Clearly,by crowdsourcing the massive existing WiFi APs that already installed by users,a large WiFi network can be founded with a low cost.In such a novel WiFi network scheme,a major challenge is to motivate users to join the network and share their family hotspots.The focus of this thesis to design such an incentive mechanism for the community network operator.In order to encourage users to join the WiFi community network and share their hotspots,we propose a new market model based on "pay" and "reward",in which users can get certain reward by sharing their own hotspots and need to pay certain fee to access other users' hotspots.Comparing with the traditional business models for WiFi community networks,the main feature of our proposed model is that we allow users to separately decide whether to share their own hotspots and whether to access other people's shared hotspots,hence it can better capture the real needs of users.Based on the proposed market model,we propose two payment mechanisms for roaming access: fixed monthly fees and usage-based pricing.Under the fixed monthly fee,users pay a fixed monthly fee for the unlimited access to the hotspots contributed by others during roaming,and all of the fee is finally returned to those users who share their hotspots as rewards.Under the usage-based pricing,users pay a usage-based fee according to their actual data usage at other users' hotspots during roaming.and all of the payment is finally returned to the hotspot owner whom he visits as reward.We study the user behavior and market evolution under both payment mechanisms systematically,by using the evolutionary game theory,and analyze the market equilibrium and the equilibrium stability.Finally,we perform numerical studies and find the relationship between the stable equilibrium point and system parameters,which provides a guidance for the management and optimization of such a WiFi community network.