Two-side pricing in the content distributed network under traffic dynamics

Abstract

The content distributed networks (CDNs) have been extending their market coverage on the conventional Internet environment by providing better quality of service (QoS) to the consumers. We consider the CDN as an economic player that competes with transit service provider (TSP), and model it as a platform that mediates content providers (CPs) and Internet service providers (ISPs) that make an independent decision on their participation to the CDN. Given the information about CPs and ISPs, the CDN can maximize its revenue by optimizing the prices at the both sides. This problem can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem. However, all possible combinations of participating CPs and ISPs should be considered, which require intensive computation, in particular, under CP dynamics where CPs arrive and depart the market over time. In this work, we develop a low-complexity pricing scheme that aims to find close-to-optimal prices.