Spare Capacity Monetization by Opportunistic

Mobile data traffic has been growing at an exponential rate with traffic volume doubling every year and with some predicting more than 18-fold increase in data traffic in five years [3]. This growth is being fueled by the advent of highly capable smartphones and tablets which in turn is leading to a fundamental change in mobile subscriber behavior. It is moving typical data usage beyond low-level applications (such as text messaging, ringtones and wallpapers) to full-fledged multimedia and interactive services. As reported in [3, 6] every other bit being carried on mobile networks is now video, with more than 25% coming from Youtube alone. To the mobile operator, although this explosive increase represents the greatest potential for revenue growth yet it also poses the greatest threat due to increased congestion which in turn adds further pressure to grow mobile network data capacity. It is clear that the increased usage has resulted in increased revenue for the mobile operator but the rate at which revenue is growing is nowhere near the rate of growth of traffic. Increasing network capacity on the other hand involves major capital investment for spectrum and network infrastructure. All this is increasingly raising the specter that at some point capacity costs may even begin to outweigh revenues thus greatly lowering the incentives for capital investments in mobile networks. 1