TY - JOUR
T1 - Economic Viability of a Virtual ISP
AU - Liu, Shengxin
AU - Joe-Wong, Carlee
AU - Chen, Jiasi
AU - Brinton, Christopher G.
AU - Tan, Chee Wei
AU - Zheng, Liang
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 28, 2018; revised November 16, 2019; accepted February 11, 2020; approved by IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORK-ING Editor S. Shakkottai. Date of publication March 16, 2020; date of current version April 16, 2020. This work was supported in part by the NSF under Grant CNS-1751075, in part by the Science Commission of Shenzhen Municipality Project under Grant JCYJ20170818094955771 and Grant JCYJ20170307090810981, and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61771018. This article was presented at the IEEE INFOCOM 2017. (Corresponding author: Shengxin Liu.) Shengxin Liu is with the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 (e-mail: millersxliu@ gmail.com).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1993-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2020/4
Y1 - 2020/4
N2 - Growing mobile data usage has led to end users paying substantial data costs, while Internet service providers (ISPs) struggle to upgrade their networks to keep up with demand and maintain high quality-of-service (QoS). This problem is particularly severe for smaller ISPs with less capital. Instead of simply upgrading their network infrastructure, ISPs can pool their networks to provide a good QoS and attract more users. Such a vISP (virtual ISP), for example, Google's Project Fi, allows users to access any of its partner ISPs' networks. We provide the first systematic analysis of a vISP's economic impact, showing that the vISP provides a viable solution for smaller ISPs attempting to attract more users, but may not maintain a positive profit if users' data demands evolve. To do so, we consider users' decisions of whether to defect from their current ISP to the vISP, as well as existing ISPs' decisions on whether to partner with the vISP. We derive the vISP's dependence on user behavior and partner ISPs: users with very light or very heavy usage are the most likely to defect, while ISPs with heavy-usage customers can benefit from declining to partner with the vISP. Our analytical results are verified with extensive numerical simulations.
AB - Growing mobile data usage has led to end users paying substantial data costs, while Internet service providers (ISPs) struggle to upgrade their networks to keep up with demand and maintain high quality-of-service (QoS). This problem is particularly severe for smaller ISPs with less capital. Instead of simply upgrading their network infrastructure, ISPs can pool their networks to provide a good QoS and attract more users. Such a vISP (virtual ISP), for example, Google's Project Fi, allows users to access any of its partner ISPs' networks. We provide the first systematic analysis of a vISP's economic impact, showing that the vISP provides a viable solution for smaller ISPs attempting to attract more users, but may not maintain a positive profit if users' data demands evolve. To do so, we consider users' decisions of whether to defect from their current ISP to the vISP, as well as existing ISPs' decisions on whether to partner with the vISP. We derive the vISP's dependence on user behavior and partner ISPs: users with very light or very heavy usage are the most likely to defect, while ISPs with heavy-usage customers can benefit from declining to partner with the vISP. Our analytical results are verified with extensive numerical simulations.
KW - Virtual ISP
KW - data market dynamics
KW - network economics
KW - shared mobile network
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U2 - 10.1109/TNET.2020.2977198
DO - 10.1109/TNET.2020.2977198
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85083746379
SN - 1063-6692
VL - 28
SP - 902
EP - 916
JO - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
IS - 2
M1 - 9037180
ER -