Managing cellular congestion using incentives

Mobile data traffic is expected to grow exponentially in the next few years due to the explosive growth of mobile web and video traffic on smartphones. Wireless operators have invested heavily to make infrastructural improvements by installing new cell towers and offloading cellular data traffic to Wi-Fi to resolve congestion. They are also exploring the use of behavioral and economic interventions to manage congestion. To understand the role of interventions, we distributed smartphones to students at Purdue University, loaded with applications to perform monitoring and location tracking with user consent. We conducted two experiments: first with 14 phones of one type, then with 30 phones of two types. Wi-Fi traffic and cellular network data usage were collected and analyzed to characterize and quantify the changes in usage behaviors; the second experiment also captured location data during compliance/non-compliance to incentive messages. The trial seeks not only to experiment with incentives and disincentives to observe their effectiveness, but also to understand current mobile broadband and Wi-Fi usage behaviors in a campus environment. Our results indicate a high level of compliance with economic incentives and disincentives. Detailed analysis further showed correlation with two psychological measures of each user (agreeableness and neuroticism). In addition, we found schemes with probabilistic payments of higher incentive amounts getting more positive results compared to schemes with definite payments with lower incentive amounts, despite similar total payout.