Bandwidth and Cache Leasing in Wireless Information Centric Networks: a Game Theoretic Study

Abstract

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.

A Decomposition Framework for Optimal Edge-Cache Leasing

“…Cache leasing schemes have been approached from a competitive [28], [29] and a cooperative [8], [30] perspective. In the latter work, Poularakis et al propose offloading of backhaul traffic to local caches jointly optimizing caching incentive, content placement and routing policies.…”

Nice

“…Content caching has been studied for some time by the research community, spanning a wide spectrum, including small cell networks (SCNs) [7,8], content distribution networks (CDNs) [9] and information-centric networks (ICN) [10]. For example, Sourlas et al [11] study making distributed cache management decisions in order to efficiently place replicas of information in dedicated storage devices attached to nodes in an ICN.…”

Optimal Mechanism Design with Flexible Consumers and Costly Supply

“…Consider next auction-based content delivery in Wireless Information Centric Networks [4] where multiple content providers compete for limited cache storage resources provided by a Wireless Access Point (WAP) in a given region for a certain time period. Suppose the WAP has k cache servers with storage capacities c 1 < c 2 < .…”