An Iterative Double Auction Mechanism for Mobile Data Offloading

Mobile data offloading through complementary network technologies such as WiFi and femtocell can significantly alleviate network congestion and enhance users’ QoS. In this paper we consider a market where mobile network operators (MNOs) lease third-party deployed WiFi or femtocell access points (APs) to dynamically offload the traffic of their mobile users. We assume that each MNO can employ multiple APs and each AP can concurrently serve traffic from multiple MNOs. We design an iterative double auction mechanism that ensures the efficient operation of the market, where MNOs maximize their offloading benefits and APs minimize their offloading costs. Such a mechanism incorporates the special characteristics of the wireless network, such as the coupling of MNOs’ offloading decisions and APs’ capacity constraints. The proposed market scheme does not require full information about the MNOs and APs, incurs minimum communication overhead, and creates nonnegative revenue for the market broker.