An efficient auction-based mechanism for mobile data offloading

The opportunistic utilization of third party WiFi access devices to offload customer traffic from the mobile network has recently gained momentum as a promising approach to increase the network capacity and simultaneously reduce the energy consumption of the radio access network (RAN) infrastructure. To foster the opportunistic utilization of unexploited Internet connections, we propose a new and open market where a mobile operator can lease the bandwidth made available by third parties (residential users or private companies) through their access points to increase dynamically (and adaptively) the network capacity. We formulate the offloading problem as a reverse auction considering the most general case of partial covering of the traffic to be offloaded. We discuss the conditions (i) to offload the maximum amount of data traffic according to the capacity made available by third party access devices, (ii) to foster the participation of access point owners (individual rationality), and (iii) to prevent market manipulation (incentive compatibility). Finally, we propose three alternative greedy algorithms that efficiently solve the offloading problem, even for large-size network scenarios.