Distributed Pricing and Bandwidth Allocation in Crowdsourced Wireless Community Networks

With the rapid growth of global mobile data traffic, Wi-Fi plays an increasingly important role in expanding network capacity. To overcome the geographical coverage limit of Wi-Fi APs, especially for mobile users, the crowdsourced wireless community network has emerged as a cost-effcient way for providing Internet access services. For instance, it is plausible to share their private residential Wi-Fi APs with each other by designing some tailored incentive/pricing mechanisms.Thus motivated, we propose a distributed pricing and bandwidth allocation scheme to maximize the profit of Wi-Fi providers and provide better Internet services to mobile users. Firstly, we study the stationary networks with incomplete information of users and propose distributed pricing and bandwidth allocation algorithms for single-AP regions and AP group regions, respectively. Then, we generalize the study to dynamic networks and explore distributed pricing based on the statistics of users' mobility. Further, we design an online bandwidth allocation algorithm according to the real-time user information. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed distributed pricing and bandwidth allocation scheme, comparing with the operator's pricing scheme, has a better performance on both Wi-Fi APs' profit and user experience.