Symbiotic Content Caching in Next-Generation Information-Centric Networking

The continuous growth of mobile data traffic with strict time requirements calls for the development of sustainable edge content caching solutions. This becomes more prominent in the setting of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures, where different ICNs are leasing caching slices to the available content providers (CPs), who in turn offer their services to the users. In this paper, we introduce a novel symbiotic content caching framework that provides the necessary economic benefits to the ICNs and the CPs to mutualistically collaborate among each other. The corresponding mutualistic interactions among the ICNs and CPs are studied under the prism of two different market-based models, namely the competitive market and oligopoly market models. A game-theoretic approach is followed in order to determine the optimal leasing prices of the ICNs' content caching slices and the CPs' optimal amount of leased caching memory from the ICNs. The performance evaluation of the proposed new symbiotic content caching paradigm is achieved via modeling and simulation, while the benefits and drawbacks of the competitive and oligopoly market modeling approaches are revealed and discussed.