Smart Data Pricing

Chapter 14Spare Capacity Monetization by Opportunistic Content Scheduling

BELL LABS and ALCATEL-LUCENT

14.1 Summary

In recent years, mobile data traffic has been growing at an exponential rate with traffic volume doubling every year and some studies predicting even more than 18-fold increase in data traffic in the next 5 years [1]. This rapid increase in data traffic is making it necessary to grow network capacity at a much faster rate than ever before. Unfortunately, the rate of growth of data revenue is much lower than the rate of growth of traffic, raising the specter that at some point capacity costs may even begin to outweigh revenues thus greatly lowering the incentives for capital investments. At the same time, the highly uneven usage by data users has resulted in significant network inefficiencies whereby even congested networks are heavily underutilized most of the time. In this chapter, we present the capacity monetization system PLUTUS that taps this stranded network capacity for additional revenue and enhanced network efficiency.

Many factors have contributed to the mobile data tsunami, including the introduction of smartphones along with a wide variety of multimedia-focused mobile applications and the increase in performance of the mobile technology as it moved from 2G on to 4G. The industry's bold but short experimentation with unlimited data plans allowed the subscribers armed with powerful devices to unleash an onslaught of uncontrolled traffic. The resulting ...