Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a novel paradigm that aims at improving the performance of today's Internet by supporting caching and multicast content delivery on every network device. The main contribution of this work is to propose a centralized strategy to stimulate third parties to jointly lease the unused bandwidth and storage available on wireless access points in an ICN. We formulate this problem as a combinatorial reverse auction run by a content provider willing to increase the number of users reached by his service. We show that the optimal allocation with partial coverage problem is NP-hard, we then provide greedy heuristics that guarantee the individual rationality and truthfulness properties, and compare their performance numerically. We evaluate the benefits of our proposed mechanisms in terms of the cost savings for the content provider obtained by offloading his infrastructure through the caches, and the reduced computational time to execute the allocation algorithms. We compare the results obtained in this centralized setting, with those that can be observed when the mobile clients autonomously choose which access point they prefer to use, among those activated by the auction mechanism. We model this second scenario as a congestion game, showing that it exhibits desired properties (i.e., existence and uniqueness of a Nash Equilibrium), and comparing its social welfare with the centralized case.
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