A Novel Centralized Cloud-Based Mobile Data Rollover Management
Zhaleh Sadreddini, Halim Yanıkömeroğlu · IEEE Wireless Communications · 2021
Mobile service providers (SPs) offer various data plans to satisfy the needs of their customers and to maximize their own profits. One of these plans is unlimited Internet access. However, in practice there is a concern for customers who do not want to pay premium prices for unlimited plans, as exceeding the maximum data allowance in a limited plan may result in a high penalty. But when users travel abroad, roaming services based on current technology have limited coverage and high prices, which do not meet customer expectations. A new paradigm to overcome these problems is a virtual SIM card (V-SIM), which can be established based on 5G network architecture. This new approach uses cloud technology to enable customers to have the data they require wherever they want. In this work, we propose a cloud-based service for users to provide data all over the world by designing the novel architecture of V-SIM technology based on 5G communication systems. More precisely, a new scheme, called a centralized cloud data center, or `data-pool' for short, is designed to present data rent and release facilities for mobile users any time and everywhere. The benefits of the proposed scheme for both SPs and their customers are modeled and analyzed based on real-world experiments. Finally, by considering the user's behavior, the performance of the proposed approach is compared to the conventional method in terms of the monthly data usage, monthly data rent/offload status, and the payment with and without considering the proposed method.