PROJECT TITLE :

Location-Flexible Mobile Data Service in Overseas Market

ABSTRACT:

Mobile network operators, also known as MNOs, are the companies that are responsible for providing wireless data services. These services are based on a tariff data plan that has a data cap per month. Traditionally, the data cap is only applicable to the consumption of data within the user's own country, and users are required to pay additional roaming fees for any data consumed outside of the country. A location-flexible service that has recently emerged enables users to access the domestic data cap while they are located in international locations (by configuring location-flexibility with a daily fee). In this paper, the economic impact of location-flexibility on the international market is investigated and studied. Since the overseas market follows the travelers on a monthly basis, it is variable from month to month as a result. Every user in the international market makes a decision every day regarding his joint flexibility configuration and data consumption (J-FCDC), which corresponds to an on-line payoff maximization problem. We begin by analyzing the offline version of the J-FCDC problem, which is an NP-hard problem, and then we proceed to design an online strategy that has a performance guarantee that can be proven. In addition, we suggest a pricing policy for the location-flexible service that does not require the knowledge of market statistic information in order to implement it. Our research shows that the availability of location-flexibility encourages users to increase their data consumption on days with low-valuation, and that the MNO benefits from increasing users' data consumption when appropriate pricing is used. According to the numerical findings, the increased location-flexibility leads to an increase in revenue for the MNO as well as payoffs for the users.