Participatory Budget and Rate Allocation in Mobile Data Offloading

Most of existing works about data offloading do not consider the participation of mobile subscribers (MSs) when designing the budget allocation, such that the fairness performance is challenging. For a mobile data offloading system consisting of a base station run by a service provider (SP), multiple MSs, and several third-party WiFi access points (APs), in this paper we study how the SP allocates the budget among APs and arranges the offloading data rate for MSs such that the fairness of each MS’s profit is guaranteed. By jointly considering the preferences of MSs for different APs and budget limit, we propose a two-phase participatory budget and rate allocation (PBRA) scheme where a core solution is designed for the budget allocation in the first phase to guarantee the fairness of all MSs, and an optimal rate allocation based on the core solution is designed to maximize the expected amount of data offloading in the second phase. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed PBRA scheme. Specifically, our proposed scheme can achieve the fairness among all MSs with a less performance loss in terms of the expected amount of data offloading by comparing with three benchmark schemes.