Enabling crowd-sourced mobile Internet access

Abstract

Crowd-sourced mobile Internet access services enable mobile users to connect with each other and share their Internet connections. This is a promising solution for addressing users' increasing needs for ubiquitous connectivity and alleviating network congestion. The success of such services heavily depends on users' willingness to contribute their resources. In this paper, we consider a general model for such services, and design a distributed incentive mechanism for encouraging users' participation. This bargaining based scheme ensures that the contribution of user resources, in terms of Internet access bandwidths and battery energy, and the allocation of service capacity, measured in the delivered mobile data, are Pareto efficient and proportionally fair. The numerical results verify that the service always improves users' performance and that these benefits depend on the diversity of the users' resources. © 2014 IEEE.