Economics of WiFi Offloading: Trading Delay for Cellular Capacity

Cellular networks are facing severe traffic overloads due to the proliferation of smart handheld devices and traffic-hungry applications. A cost-effective and practical solution is to offload cellular data through WiFi. Recent theoretical and experimental studies show that a scheme, referred to as delayed WiFi offloading, can significantly save the cellular capacity by delaying users' data and exploiting mobility and thus increasing chance of meeting WiFi APs (Access Points). Despite a huge potential of WiFi offloading in alleviating mobile data explosion, its success largely depends on the economic incentives provided to users and network providers to deploy and use delayed offloading. In this paper, we study how much economic benefits can be generated due to delayed WiFi offloading, by modeling the interaction between a single provider and users based on a two-stage sequential game. We first analytically prove that WiFi offloading is economically beneficial for both the provider and users. Also, we conduct trace-driven numerical analysis to quantify the practical gain, where the increase ranges from 21 to 152% in the provider's revenue, and from 73 to 319% in the users' surplus.