Pricing for Opportunistic Data Sharing via Personal Hotspot

A smartphone user's personal hotspot (pH) allows one to share cellular connection to another device nearby, but such sharing consumes the limited data quota in his or her two-part tariff plan and may lead to overage charge. This paper studies how to motivate such secondary data sharing via pHs for roaming markets, and proposes pricing incentive for a secondary data buyer (typically, a traveler) to opportunistically demand and reward pHs (if any) in the vicinity to reach a win-win situation. The pricing scheme practically takes into account the information uncertainty at the traveler side, including the random mobility and the sharing cost distribution of selfish local users who share pHs. Though the pricing optimization is non-convex problem, we show that there always exists a unique optimal price to tradeoff between the sharing opportunity and the sharing price, and can further extend the optimal pricing to the case of heterogeneous selling users/pHs who have diverse data usage behaviors. Lacking selfish pHs' information and cooperation, the traveler's expected cost is higher than that under the complete information, but the gap diminishes as the selfish pHs' spatial density increases. The traveler may or may not benefit from the diversity of pHs' data usage behaviors. Perhaps surprisingly, when the pHs' data usages are very diverse, the traveler's expected cost does not change with such diversity.