Demo: enabling mobile time-dependent pricing

ABSTRACT

ISPs around the world have begun to offer new pricing plans for wireless data, such as usage-based pricing in the U.S., to mitigate recent growth in bandwidth demand. Time Dependent Pricing (TDP) represents a next step in this direction [1, 2]. With TDP, ISPs can shift traffic to off-peak periods, thus reducing their cost, while consumers save money by choosing the time of usage. TDP uses a feedback control loop between an ISP and its users to account for users' responses to offered prices in optimizing the future prices. We have implemented such a TDP system and are presently conducting a user trial at Princeton while planning larger trials with commercial ISPs. This demo will introduce the audience to our system's ISP- and user-side features. On the ISP side, we show the current network congestion, while on the user side, we show device UIs displaying the offered prices, the device usage history, and automated scheduling of applications to keep users within a specified budget.

References

1. TUBE Website. http://scenic.princeton.edu/tube/.
2. Joe-Wong, C., Ha, S., and Chiang, M. Time-Dependent Broadband Pricing: Feasibility and Benefits. Proc. of ICDCS (June 2011).

Index Terms

• Hardware

  • Communication hardware, interfaces and storage

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction devices

      • Touch screens

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Graphical user interfaces

  • Interaction design

• Networks