A Collaborative Pricing Framework for In-Network Caching in Information- Centric Networking

Abstract

As a promising future Internet architecture, information-centric networking (ICN) takes the content as the focal point while shifting away from the traditional host-centric paradigm. The content-oriented feature and in-network caching from ICN enable new economic or pricing models among Internet service provider (ISP), content provider (CP), and users. The current pricing models in ICN usually focus on that users directly pay the content price to the CP, which leaves the ISPs out of the payment processes, resulting in ISP’s reluctance to deploy ICN. Furthermore, the existing models largely ignore the interaction between the pricing strategy and user consumption behaviors, such as choosing cheaper ISPs or giving up the acquisition of the content with high prices. In order to design a collaborative pricing framework to prompt ISP’s deploying ICN, we first develop a content acquisition scheme in conjunction with the lump-sum and retail strategies for ICN. Within this scheme, a user consumption model to characterize the user’s behaviors in using the Internet and the utility function for all ICN entities, including the CP, access ICN, and transit ICN, are formulated to maximize the revenues of all entities. Our extensive analysis and numerical results show that the proposed collaborative pricing framework significantly outperforms the existing scheme in joint caching and pricing strategies .