1,091 research outputs found
Pricing and Resource Allocation via Game Theory for a Small-Cell Video Caching System
Evidence indicates that downloading on-demand videos accounts for a dramatic
increase in data traffic over cellular networks. Caching popular videos in the
storage of small-cell base stations (SBS), namely, small-cell caching, is an
efficient technology for reducing the transmission latency whilst mitigating
the redundant transmissions of popular videos over back-haul channels. In this
paper, we consider a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a
network service provider (NSP), several video retailers (VR), and mobile users
(MU). The NSP leases its SBSs to the VRs for the purpose of making profits, and
the VRs, after storing popular videos in the rented SBSs, can provide faster
local video transmissions to the MUs, thereby gaining more profits. We conceive
this system within the framework of Stackelberg game by treating the SBSs as a
specific type of resources. We first model the MUs and SBSs as two independent
Poisson point processes, and develop, via stochastic geometry theory, the
probability of the specific event that an MU obtains the video of its choice
directly from the memory of an SBS. Then, based on the probability derived, we
formulate a Stackelberg game to jointly maximize the average profit of both the
NSP and the VRs. Also, we investigate the Stackelberg equilibrium by solving a
non-convex optimization problem. With the aid of this game theoretic framework,
we shed light on the relationship between four important factors: the optimal
pricing of leasing an SBS, the SBSs allocation among the VRs, the storage size
of the SBSs, and the popularity distribution of the VRs. Monte-Carlo
simulations show that our stochastic geometry-based analytical results closely
match the empirical ones. Numerical results are also provided for quantifying
the proposed game-theoretic framework by showing its efficiency on pricing and
resource allocation.Comment: Accepted to appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communications, special issue on Video Distribution over Future Interne
Offloading Content with Self-organizing Mobile Fogs
Mobile users in an urban environment access content on the internet from
different locations. It is challenging for the current service providers to
cope with the increasing content demand from a large number of collocated
mobile users. In-network caching to offload content at nodes closer to users
alleviate the issue, though efficient cache management is required to find out
who should cache what, when and where in an urban environment, given nodes
limited computing, communication and caching resources. To address this, we
first define a novel relation between content popularity and availability in
the network and investigate a node's eligibility to cache content based on its
urban reachability. We then allow nodes to self-organize into mobile fogs to
increase the distributed cache and maximize content availability in a
cost-effective manner. However, to cater rational nodes, we propose a coalition
game for the nodes to offer a maximum "virtual cache" assuming a monetary
reward is paid to them by the service/content provider. Nodes are allowed to
merge into different spatio-temporal coalitions in order to increase the
distributed cache size at the network edge. Results obtained through
simulations using realistic urban mobility trace validate the performance of
our caching system showing a ratio of 60-85% of cache hits compared to the
30-40% obtained by the existing schemes and 10% in case of no coalition
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