Age of Information Aware Content Resale Mechanism With Edge Caching

Abstract

Edge caching is an efficient technique for mitigating redundant data transmissions over backhaul links. Contents are constantly evolving, and thus the cached contents should be updated timely to guarantee freshness. Information freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric. In this paper, we explore a content resale problem, where a Network Service Provider (NSP) purchases contents from Content Providers (CPs) then sells contents to users. We model the problem as a three-stage sequential problem. Then we decompose the problem into two sub-problems on deciding the contents to be purchased and cached, and the respective prices. We solve the sub-problems through the framework of Stackelberg game and auction respectively. For the content purchase, we consider four different cases to design the auction mechanisms. In the auctions, the NSP has to reveal its private information due to the AoI characteristics. Furthermore, we prove that such disclosure will not bring the loss of the NSP’s utility. Finally, numerical results in different cases are provided to show that the NSP can efficiently exploit the benefit from the knowledge about CPs’ production costs and the competition among CPs under our proposed mechanism.