The Effect of Caching on CP and ISP Policies in Information-Centric Networks

Internet traffic volume is increasing, and this causes scalability issues in content delivery. Information-centric network has been introduced to support this increase in Internet traffic through caching. While collaborative caching in information-centric network is a crucial feature to improve network performance and reduce delivery costs in content distribution, the current pricing strategies on the Internet are not incentive compatible with information-centric network interconnection. In this paper, we focus on the economic incentive interactions in caching deployment between several types of information-centric network providers (content provider and Internet service provider). In particular, we develop game-theoretic models to study the interaction between providers in an information-centric network model where the providers are motivated to cache and share content. We use a generalized Zipf distribution to model content popularity. We formulate the interactions between the Internet service providers and between the content providers as a noncooperative game. We use a Stackelberg game model to capture the interactions between the content provider and Internet service providers. Through mathematical analysis, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium under some conditions. An iterative and distributed algorithm based on best response dynamics is proposed to achieve the equilibrium point. The numerical simulations illustrate that our proposed game models result in a win-win solution.