Multi-Item Auction Based Mechanism for Mobile Data Offloading: A Robust Optimization Approach

Abstract : The opportunistic utilization of access devices to offload mobile data from cellular network has been considered as a promising approach to cope with the explosive growth of cellular traffic. To foster this opportunistic utilization, we consider a mobile data offloading market where mobile network operator (MNO) can sell bandwidth made available by the access points (APs) to increase MNO's profit. We formulate the offloading problem as a multi-item auction and study MNO's profit maximization problem. We discuss the conditions to (i) offload the maximum amount of data traffic, (ii) foster the participation of mobile subscribers (MSs) (individual rationality), (iii) prevent market manipulation (incentive compatibility) and (iv) preserve budget feasibility of MSs. Then, we propose a robust optimization based method to implement multi-item auction mechanism. We further propose two iterative algorithms that efficiently solve the offloading problem. The simulation results show the efficiency and robustness of our proposed methods for cellular data offloading.