A Game-theoretic analysis on the economic viability of mobile content pre-staging
A Game-theoretic analysis on the economic viability of mobile content pre-staging
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DOI：
10.1007/s11276-019-02176-3
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发表时间：
2019-11
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Zhen Li;Qi Liao;A. Striegel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Zhen Li;Qi Liao;A. Striegel
无线通信中对数据需求的快速增长促使移动服务运营商和研究界寻求有效的技术和替代解决方案来解决数据需求问题。一种特殊的解决方案是内容预分阶段，它试图将内容推送到尽可能靠近移动设备的位置，以便在高峰时段降低需求。假设移动设备存储可以作为移动运营商系统容量的一部分由最终用户直接或间接由运营商提供这一有趣的情况，本文调查了移动服务业务和内容预准备的各个利益相关者可能受到的经济影响。我们通过在博弈论框架中对移动运营商、最终用户和内容提供商之间的相互作用进行建模，来探讨内容预留的经济含义。运营商设计定价机制来影响内容提供商和最终用户的行为，以实现利润最大化。特别是，引入了两种价格，即向内容提供商收取的在移动设备存储上预先准备内容的价格，以及为补偿用户使用其移动设备存储而获得的金钱奖励。虽然运营商的个人激励并不一定与社会激励相一致，但内容预演的福利分析表明，这种做法通过提高网络效率来改善社会福利。内容本地化增加了移动服务业务的整体盈利能力，这与预演内容的相关性呈正相关。承运商的定价机制决定了各相关方分享业务增加的盈利能力的方式。虽然运营商可以战略性地设计价格，以保持在增加的盈利能力中保留更大份额，但内容预置可以使游戏中的三方受益，即运营商在节省的容量和新收入方面获得收益，用户因共享移动设备存储而获得QOE、内容和经济回报，内容提供商从增加内容访问中获得增加的收入。
The rapid growth of demand for data in wireless communications has driven the mobile service carriers and the research community to seek both effective technical and alternative solutions to the data demand problem. One particular solution, content pre-staging, tries to push content as close to the mobile device as possible in order to lower demand at peak times. Assuming the interesting case that mobile device storage could be made available as part of the mobile carrier’s system capacity either directly by the end user or indirectly by the carrier, this paper investigates the potential economic impacts on the mobile service business and various stakeholders of content pre-staging. We explore the economic implications of content pre-staging by modeling the interplay among the mobile carrier, end users, and the content provider in a game theoretic framework. The carrier designs pricing mechanisms to affect the behaviors of the content provider and end users for the purpose of profit maximization. In particular, two prices are introduced, the price charged to the content provider to pre-stage content on mobile device storage, and the monetary reward to compensate users for the usage of their mobile device storage. Although the individual incentive of the carrier is not necessarily aligned with social incentives, the welfare analysis of content pre-staging shows that the practice improves social welfare by increasing network efficiency. Localizing content increases the overall profitability of mobile service business which is positively related to the relevance of the pre-staged content. The carrier’s pricing mechanisms determine the manner in which the increased profitability of the business is shared by various interested parties. While the carrier may design prices strategically to retain a larger share of the increased profitability, content pre-staging can benefit all the three parties in the game, i.e., the carrier gains in saved capacity and new revenue, users gain QoE, content, and financial rewards for sharing mobile device storage, and the content provider gains in increased revenue from increased content access.