Intelligent Systems Research Lab

Incentive Mechanisms for User Provided Networks

TUBITAK 3501 Project (2015 – 2019)

Principal Investigator Asst. Prof. Ömer Korçak

Abstract: The increasing mobile data requirement on mobile devices has led to the concept of User Provider Network (UPN), which is based on sharing the users' Internet connections. According to this approach, users with cellular connection share their own connections with others with limited or no cellular connection. An important research problem in the UPNs is about incentivizing users to participate in the system. Designing incentive mechanisms for UPNs is a quite new topic that attracts interest of both the academy and the industry in very recent years. In this project, we will study incentive mechanisms for both self-organizing autonomous UPNs, and operator-controlled UPN services. Energy consumption, data usage costs, and utility functions will be modelled carefully by performing empirical measurement-based studies as well as characterizing realistic user demands. Strategic decisions of users and operators will be studied using game theory and mechanism design tools. The main goal of this project is to design incentive mechanisms that yield efficiency, fairness, individual rationality, truthfulness and trustworthiness.