IP Flow Mobility in the Industry: From An Economic Perspective

The popularity of social media together with the advancement of mobile Internet applications enabling the uploading of data plays a dominant role in the entire Internet traffic. IP flow mobility (IFOM) is proposed as an effective means to enhance the system capacity by offloading data from the cellular network to WiFi or Femtocells or other complementary networks. Although IFOM has been extensively investigated during the past few years, most of these studies, however, are concerned with IFOM technical issues only; little work regarding the IFOM application has been done from the service providers’ perspective. Unlike previous research, in this paper, we address the economic issue involved with the IFOM technology. Specifically, competition among multiple service providers supporting or not supporting IFOM are explored, and a game model for the competition is developed. The Nash equilibrium for the game model is then analyzed. Based on the analysis, an algorithm for Nash equilibrium computation is proposed. Also, numerical experiments are conducted to determine the factors that affect the market share and profit of the service providers. We believe that this research paper will shed light on service providers for the promotion and application of IFOM technology.