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Sponsored Data Plan: A Two-Class Service Model in Wireless Data Networks

Published: 15 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Data traffic demand over the Internet is increasing rapidly, and it is changing the pricing model between Internet service providers (ISPs), content providers (CPs) and end users. One recent pricing proposal is sponsored data plan, i.e., when accessing contents from a particular CP, end users do not need to pay for that volume of traffic consumed, but the CP will sponsor for this data consumption. In this paper, our goal is to understand the rationale behind this new pricing model, as well as its impacts to the wireless data market, in particular, who will benefit and who will be hurt from this scheme. We build a two-class service model to analyze the consumers' traffic demand under the sponsored data plan with consideration of QoS. We use a two-stage Stackelberg game to characterize the interaction between CPs and the ISP and reveal a number of important findings. Our conclusions include: 1) When the ISP's capacity is sufficient, the sponsored data plan benefits consumers and CPs in the short run, but the ISP does not have incentives to further improve its service in the long run. 2) When ISP's capacity is insufficient, the ISP and end users may achieve a win- win trade, while the ISP and CPs always compete for the revenue. 3) The sponsored data plan may enlarge the un- balance in revenue distribution between different CPs; CPs with higher unit income and poorer technology support are more likely to prefer the sponsored data plan.

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  • (2024)Sponsored Data: Cooperative Pricing and Subsidizing Strategies of Mobile Telecom Carriers and Internet Content ProvidersIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2023.329433171(8923-8937)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Semantic Information Marketing in the Metaverse: A Learning-Based Contract Theory FrameworkIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2023.334540242:3(710-723)Online publication date: Mar-2024
  • (2023)Decentralized Scheduling and Dynamic Pricing for Edge Computing: A Mean Field Game ApproachIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.320469831:3(965-978)Online publication date: Jun-2023
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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGMETRICS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
June 2015
488 pages
ISBN:9781450334860
DOI:10.1145/2745844
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 June 2015

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  1. sponsored data
  2. stackelberg game

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SIGMETRICS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 239 submissions, 13%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 459 of 2,691 submissions, 17%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Sponsored Data: Cooperative Pricing and Subsidizing Strategies of Mobile Telecom Carriers and Internet Content ProvidersIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2023.329433171(8923-8937)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Semantic Information Marketing in the Metaverse: A Learning-Based Contract Theory FrameworkIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2023.334540242:3(710-723)Online publication date: Mar-2024
  • (2023)Decentralized Scheduling and Dynamic Pricing for Edge Computing: A Mean Field Game ApproachIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.320469831:3(965-978)Online publication date: Jun-2023
  • (2023)When Should Competing Mobile Telecom Carriers Provide Sponsored Data Plans Under Cross-Side Network Effects?International Journal of Electronic Commerce10.1080/10864415.2023.222690227:3(406-440)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2023
  • (2022)On the Economics Effects of CDN-Mediated Delivery on Content ProvidersIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2022.316288319:4(4449-4460)Online publication date: Dec-2022
  • (2022)Sponsored Data: On the Effect of ISP Competition on Pricing Dynamics and Content Provider Market StructuresIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.316285630:5(2018-2031)Online publication date: Oct-2022
  • (2022)Congestion-Aware Modeling and Analysis of Sponsored Data Plan from End User Perspective2022 IEEE/ACM 30th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS54832.2022.9812866(1-11)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Pricing between ISPs under Content Sponsoring In ICN2022 5th International Conference on Hot Information-Centric Networking (HotICN)10.1109/HotICN57539.2022.10036226(7-12)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2022
  • (2021)On the Economics of Network Interconnections and its Impact on Net NeutralityIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2021.309237618:4(4789-4800)Online publication date: Dec-2021
  • (2021)Should subscription-revenue internet content providers adopt sponsored data plans by mobile telecom carriers in duopoly market?Electronic Commerce Research and Applications10.1016/j.elerap.2021.10110650:COnline publication date: 1-Nov-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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