CATS-Oct-11-2013
Title[edit]
Economics of Sponsored Content in Mobile Data Networks under Uncertain Demand
Speaker[edit]
Matthew Andrews is Head of the Industrial Mathematics and Operations Research Department in the Enabling Computing Technologies domain at Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent. His research interests include wireless resource allocation, packet scheduling and approximation algorithms. Some of his recent work includes algorithms for joint scheduling and congestion control in ad-hoc networks and complexity theoretic results on the hardness of network design.
Kamal is also an Affiliated Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington and a Charter Member of TIE at its Seattle chapter.
Abstract[edit]
The explosion of demand for mobile data services in recent years has meant that many service providers are looking for novel pricing strategies that will allow them to recover the investment required to meet that demand. This development has generated a number of research challenges including:
· Which pricing mechanisms will lead to more efficient use of networks?
· How should contractual relationships between service providers/content providers/end users be defined?
· How can network measurements be used to optimize pricing plans?
· How can we implement nontraditional pricing plans at scale?
In this presentation we shall begin with a survey of recent work in this area including a description of the types of mechanism that service providers are considering. We shall then focus on the specific case of “sponsored content” where the service provider puts in place a system that allows content providers to cover the cost of end-user bandwidth. We shall develop a model for the resulting interactions when the underlying user demand is uncertain and then show that contracts can be designed that are win-win-win for the service provider, the content provider and the end user.
This is joint work with Ulas Ozen, Marty Reiman and Qiong Wang.
