Joint incentive mechanism for paid content caching and price based cache replacement policy in named data networking

Abstract

Internet traffic volume is continuing to increase rapidly. Named data networking (NDN) has been introduced to support this Internet traffic growth through caching contents close to consumers. While caching in NDN is beneficial to both Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers (CPs), ISPs serve cached contents independently without any coordination with CPs. By authorizing the ISPs to cache and distribute the contents accessible on payments, it becomes impractical for CPs to control content access and payments. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a joint incentive mechanism and a price-based cache replacement (PBCR) policy for paid content in NDN that improves the ISP's and CPs' profits. We use an auction theory, where the ISP earns profits from caching by alleviating traffic load on transit links and participating in contents selling. Therefore, before the ISP starts selling cached contents, it needs to cache them first. Furthermore, the ISP cache capacity is limited; therefore, we propose PBCR, where the PBCR triggers the content that needs to be replaced when the cache storage is full based on both content price and link cost. The simulation results show that our proposal increases the profits of all the network players involved in paid content caching and improves cache hit ratio.