Network Neutrality in Content Cache Sharing: A Bankruptcy Problem Formulation

The deployment of fifth generation (5G) mobile networks along with the massive penetration of multimedia applications render the edge cache capacity a valuable but limited network resource. Edge caching has been lately widely adopted, as it can bring to the network important benefits, such as better network utilization and higher Quality of Experience (QoE). However the cache sharing among different Content Service Providers (CSPs) is a non-trivial problem due to: i) the limited nature of cache resources, and ii) the network neutrality concept that requires equal treatment of the CSPs. In this paper, we study the cache sharing problem in the presence of multiple CSPs, focusing both on the fairness and the network performance. Taking into account the importance of network neutrality and the scarcity of the cache resources, we formulate the cache sharing as a bankruptcy problem and we propose a set of different approaches for its solution. The performance of the proposed approaches is assessed through a series of simulation experiments in different scenarios (i.e., assuming different popularity distributions and market shares), identifying the potential trade-offs.