Optimal Overbooking Mechanism in Data Plan Sharing

For mobile devices users, the inconvenience caused by the fixed data plans becomes a popular issue. With the help of personal hotspot (pH), however, the smartphone users can share network connection with other users nearby. In this paper a data plan sharing platform with reservation mechanism is proposed. The users on this platform can sell their surplus data plan traffic to make profit. A Markov decision process model was formulated and analyzed for data plan sharing platform revenue management through overbooking mechanism. The results of experiment and simulation show that the platform revenue has a considerable growth using this model.