Towards Small AoI and Low Latency via Operator Content Platform: A Contract Theory-Based Pricing

Abstract

Increasing demands of multimedia contents brings a great profit to the content providers, but also a challenge of how to efficiently delivery contents to make users have a good Quality of Experience (QoE). Take the advantage of owning wireless infrastructures, the telco operator is motivated to build a content platform for entering the market of content. In this paper, we consider a content platform belonging to the telco operator, which can provide periodically-updated contents with small Age of Information (AoI), namely, fresh contents. The content update consumes radio resource resulting in a trade-off between the AoI and the latency. We adopt the contract theory to monetize contents considering the above two factors in a realistic asymmetric information scenario. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the feasibility of the contract. We further propose the optimal update schemes and the corresponding fees, which maximizes the utility of the operator. Simulation reveals that the proposed contract enables the users, who attach importance to the freshness, to obtain frequently updating contents.