In the phase of the process that will lead to the future 5G networks, the demand of mobile data usage will continue to rise sharply, and the high cost of data will become a critical concern. As a major paradigm shift, data sponsoring has been introduced with the hope of benefiting the practice of the telecommunication industry. The main idea of data sponsoring is to subsidize the service payment while appealing to more users; it can potentially generate more profit gains for both the users and the system operators. In this paper, the intelligent interactions of three network entities, i.e., the users, the service providers, and the content providers, are analyzed based on the basic ideas of game theory, and we design an effective data sponsoring control scheme using a novel dual-leader Stackelberg game model. As dual leaders, service and content providers share the profit in a cooperative manner, and mobile users react individually to the leaders in a competitive manner. By employing different game methodologies, we investigate the mutual relationship between the network entities and aim to balance the user’s payoff and the system revenue. To validate the proposed approach, an analytic simulation model and numerical results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed approach under the 5G network infrastructure. Finally, we provide further challenges and various future opportunities in this research area.
Exploring the walled garden theory: An empirical framework to assess pricing effects on mobile data usage
