Location-Flexible Mobile Data Service in Overseas Market

Mobile network operators (MNOs) provide wireless data services based on a tariff data plan with a month data cap. Traditionally, the data cap is only valid for domestic data consumption and users have to pay extra roaming fees for overseas data consumption. A recently emerged location-flexible service allows users to access the domestic data cap in overseas locations (by configuring location-flexibility with a daily fee). This paper studies the economic impact of the location-flexibility on the overseas market. The overseas market tracks the travelers on a monthly basis, hence it is month-variant. Each user in overseas market decides his joint flexibility configuration and data consumption (J-FCDC) every day, which corresponds to an on-line payoff maximization problem. We first analyze the off-line version of J-FCDC problem (which is NP-hard), and then we design an on-line strategy with a provable performance guarantee. Moreover, we propose a pricing policy for the location-flexible service without the need of knowing the market statistic information. We find that the location-flexibility induces users to consume more data in low-valuation days, and the MNO benefits from stimulating users' data consumption through an appropriate pricing. Numerical results show that the location-flexibility improves the MNO's revenue and the users' payoffs.