On the economic effects of user-oriented delayed Wi-Fi offloading

Both users and mobile network providers increasingly suffer from explosive growth of mobile traffic. We study socalled delayed Wi-Fi offloading that has been recently proposed as a low-cost solution of alleviating mobile data explosion. Delayed Wi-Fi offloading is a technology that offloads traffic from cellular to Wi-Fi by persuading users into delaying their delay-tolerant traffic and thus actively exploiting users´ chance to meet Wi-Fi. In this paper, we study the economic effects of such user-oriented delayed Wi-Fi offloading in the monopoly market as well as the market with two providers. In the monopoly market, we model a two-stage game, where the provider selects an offloading price for which users are the price-takers. In the market with two providers, we consider a situation that either of providers, say A, launches a delayed Wi-Fi offloading service as a separate service from the original cellular service, thus allowing the users in another provider, say B, to subscribe to the offloading service from A, but with some incurring switching cost. In both markets, we study how the equilibrium offloading price changes depending on other system parameters, e.g., cellular cost, Wi-Fi density, and the number of subscribers, by computing the Nash equilibriums and providing extensive numerical results for various parameter changes, which gives us useful insights into how economically viable user-oriented delayed Wi-Fi offloading is.