Traditional regulatory methods for spectrum licensing have been recently identified as one of the causes for the under-utilization of the valuable radio spectrum. Governmental agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking ways to remove stringent regulatory barriers and facilitate broader access to the spectrum resources. The goal is to allow for an improved and ubiquitous sharing of the precious radio spectrum between commercial service providers. In this paper, we propose a novel noncooperative game theoretic approach, to show how to foster more sharing of the radio spectrum via the use of regulatory power. We define a two stage game in which the government regulators move first, followed by the providers. The providers are incentivized by lower spectrum allocation fees from the regulators in return for proof-of-sharing. The providers are offered discounted spectrum bands, potentially at different locations, but will be asked to provide coverage to users that are not subscribed to them so as to maintain their subsidy incentives from the government. In a simplification of the model, analytical expressions for the providers' perfect equilibrium strategies are derived, and we argue for the existence of the government's part of a perfect equilibrium. Our analysis shows that through subsidization, the government can provide small service providers a fair chance to compete with the large providers, thereby avoiding monopolization in the market.
Only recently, Yu and Kim @cite_34 focused on the concept of using subsidies for spectrum management. Their work analyzed price and quality of service (QoS) subsidy schemes to increase the utility of the consumers from the data plans. The goal is to increase the availability of wireless data plans to more users. In their model, the regulator offers a subsidized (i.e., less expensive) data plan to the end users with lower quality of service via subsidization to the providers. In our work, we consider subsidizing the spectrum to the providers and focus on implementing a subsidy system mainly between the providers and the government. We aim to make the subsidization seamless to the end users and aim to incentivize the providers to be more welcoming to the users subscribed to other providers. As a major difference, we focus on spectrum subsidy rather than data plan subsidy.
@cite_34
2020629327
Due to the emergence of smart devices, mobile data traffic grows exponentially. A Cisco report predicts that global mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015. Therefore, the spectrum shortage continues and the spectrum price increases, which will eventually lead to decrease of user welfare. Another side effect of the data traffic growth is the polarization of data traffic among users. To resolve these problems, we introduce two subsidy schemes (i.e., price and quality of service (QoS) subsidy schemes) and mathematically analyze the effect of each scheme. We identify that if the regulator has sufficient spectrum amount for the network service, then the QoS subsidy scheme will be a good choice for all players in the network service market. Otherwise, the price subsidy scheme can be better from user welfare perspective. Even though our analytic results are derived under some assumptions for mathematical tractability, it will provide good intuitions for spectrum regulation. Unlike telephone operators, which pay termination fees to reach the users of another network, Internet Content Providers (CPs) do not pay the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of users they reach. While the consequent cross subsidization to CPs has nurtured content innovations at the edge of the Internet, it reduces the investment incentives for the access ISPs to expand capacity. As potential charges for terminating CPs' traffic are criticized under the net neutrality debate, we propose to allow CPs to voluntarily subsidize the usagebased fees induced by their content traffic for end-users. We model the regulated subsidization competition among CPs under a neutral network and show how deregulation of subsidization could increase an access ISP's utilization and revenue, strengthening its investment incentives. Although the competition might harm certain CPs, we find that the main cause comes from high access prices rather than the existence of subsidization. Our results suggest that subsidization competition will increase the competitiveness and welfare of the Internet content market; however, regulators might need to regulate access prices if the access ISP market is not competitive enough. We envision that subsidization competition could become a viable model for the future Internet. We address the problem of spectrum pricing in a cognitive radio network where multiple primary service providers compete with each other to offer spectrum access opportunities to the secondary users. By using an equilibrium pricing scheme, each of the primary service providers aims to maximize its profit under quality of service (QoS) constraint for primary users. We formulate this situation as an oligopoly market consisting of a few firms and a consumer. The QoS degradation of the primary services is considered as the cost in offering spectrum access to the secondary users. For the secondary users, we adopt a utility function to obtain the demand function. With a Bertrand game model, we analyze the impacts of several system parameters such as spectrum substitutability and channel quality on the Nash equilibrium (i.e., equilibrium pricing adopted by the primary services). We present distributed algorithms to obtain the solution for this dynamic game. The stability of the proposed dynamic game algorithms in terms of convergence to the Nash equilibrium is studied. However, the Nash equilibrium is not efficient in the sense that the total profit of the primary service providers is not maximized. An optimal solution to gain the highest total profit can be obtained. A collusion can be established among the primary services so that they gain higher profit than that for the Nash equilibrium. However, since one or more of the primary service providers may deviate from the optimal solution, a punishment mechanism may be applied to the deviating primary service provider. A repeated game among primary service providers is formulated to show that the collusion can be maintained if all of the primary service providers are aware of this punishment mechanism, and therefore, properly weight their profits to be obtained in the future. The interaction of a content provider with end users on an infrastructure platform built and maintained by a service provider can be viewed as a two-sided market. Content sponsoring, i.e., charging the content provider instead of viewers for resources consumed in viewing the content, can benefit all parties involved. Without being charged directly or having it counted against their monthly data quotas, end users will view more content, allowing the content provider to generate more advertising revenue, extracted by the service provider to subsidize its investment and operation of the network infrastructure. However, realizing such gains requires a proper contractual relationship between the service provider and content provider. We consider the determination of this contract through a Stackelberg game. The service provider sets a pricing schedule for sponsoring and the content provider responds by deciding how much content to sponsor. We analyze the best strategies for the content provider and service provider in the event that the underlying demand for the content is uncertain. Two separate settings are defined. In the first, end users can be charged for non-sponsored views on a per-byte basis. In the second we extend the model to the more common case in which end users purchase data quotas on a periodic basis. Our main conclusion is that a coordinating contract can be designed that maximizes total system profit. Moreover, the additional profit due to sponsoring can be split between the content provider and service provider in an arbitrary manner.