Communications Network Economics

Today’s communication networks are highly complex, carry heterogeneous traffic in diverse environments, and are often owned by multiple profit-making entities. To successfully maintain, optimize, and upgrade such large distributed networks, it is important to design new economic incentive mechanisms as well as develop new technologies. The market deregulation of the telecommunication industry in many countries makes such economic consideration even more urgent, as there are often conflicting goals between the regulators and the commercial operators.

We will first illustrate how economics can help us better understand the networking industry reality, predict user behaviors, envision new network services, and provide policy recommendations. Then we will focus on the case study of incentive mechanisms for user-provided networks (UPNs). UPNs is a new communication paradigm, which enables users to improve their communications experiences by exploiting the diverse communication needs and resources of other users. The success of UPNs, however, relies on carefully designed incentive mechanisms that effectively encourage users’ voluntary participations and cooperations. We will introduce a new paradigm of cooperative video streaming based on the concept of UPN, where mobile users crowdsource their Internet connectivities and adaptively choose video downloading sequences and streaming qualities. We will introduce a multi-dimensional auction framework, which effectively incentivizes users to cooperate in a distributed fashion.

Bio: Jianwei Huang is an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Communications Society, and a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in Computer Science. He is an Associate Professor and Director of the Network Communications and Economics Lab (ncel.ie.cuhk.edu.hk), in the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University in 2005, and worked as a Postdoc Research Associate at Princeton University during 2005-2007.

Dr. Huang is the co-recipient of 8 Best Paper Awards, including IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2011. He has co-authored six books, including the textbook on “Wireless Network Pricing.” He received the CUHK Young Researcher Award in 2014 and IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2009. He has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications,  IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications – Cognitive Radio Series, and IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking. He has served as the Chair of IEEE ComSoc Cognitive Network Technical Committee and Multimedia Communications Technical Committee. He is the recipient of IEEE ComSoc Multimedia Communications Technical Committee Distinguished Service Award in 2015 and IEEE GLOBECOM Outstanding Service Award in 2010.