Title
Sponsored Data Plan: A Two-Class Service Model in Wireless Data Networks
Abstract
Data traffic demand over the Internet is increasing rapidly, and it is changing the pricing model between Internet service providers (ISPs), content providers (CPs) and end users. One recent pricing proposal is sponsored data plan, i.e., when accessing contents from a particular CP, end users do not need to pay for that volume of traffic consumed, but the CP will sponsor for this data consumption. In this paper, our goal is to understand the rationale behind this new pricing model, as well as its impacts to the wireless data market, in particular, who will benefit and who will be hurt from this scheme. We build a two-class service model to analyze the consumers' traffic demand under the sponsored data plan with consideration of QoS. We use a two-stage Stackelberg game to characterize the interaction between CPs and the ISP and reveal a number of important findings. Our conclusions include: 1) When the ISP's capacity is sufficient, the sponsored data plan benefits consumers and CPs in the short run, but the ISP does not have incentives to further improve its service in the long run. 2) When ISP's capacity is insufficient, the ISP and end users may achieve a win- win trade, while the ISP and CPs always compete for the revenue. 3) The sponsored data plan may enlarge the un- balance in revenue distribution between different CPs; CPs with higher unit income and poorer technology support are more likely to prefer the sponsored data plan.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2745844.2745863
International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
sponsored data,stackelberg game
Revenue,Incentive,End user,Computer science,Short run,Computer security,Quality of service,Service model,Stackelberg competition,Environmental economics,The Internet,Distributed computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
43
1
0163-5999
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.79
18
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Liang Zhang117611.95
Weijie Wu211213.30
Dan Wang316913.41