A Reverse Auction for Proactively Expressing the Delay Tolerance in Cellular Network

Cellular networks (e. g. , 3G) are currently facing severe traffic overload problems caused by excessive traffic demands. So Offloading part of the cellular traffic through other forms of networks, such as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) and WiFi hotspots, is a promising solution. However, since these networks can only provide intermittent connectivity to mobile users, utilizing them for cellular traffic offloading may result in a non-negligible delay. As the delay increases, the user-s satisfaction decreases. In this work, we investigate the tradeoff between the amount of traffic being offloaded and the user-s satisfaction. We provide a novel incentive framework to motivate users to leverage their delay tolerance for cellular traffic offloading. Users are provided with incentives, i. e. , receiving discount for their service charge if they are willing to wait longer for data downloading. During the delay, part of the cellular data traffic may be opportunistically offloaded to other networks mentioned above, and the user is assured to receive the remaining part of the data via cellular network when the delay period ends. To minimize the incentive cost given an offloading target, users with high delay tolerance and large offloading potential should be prioritized for traffic offloading. To effectively capture the dynamic characteristics of users delay tolerance, our incentive framework is based on reverse auction to let users proactively express their delay tolerance by submitting bids. We further illustrate how to predict the offloading potential of the users by using stochastic analysis for both DTN and WiFi cases. Extensive trace-driven simulations verify the efficiency of our incentive framework for cellular traffic offloading