A Cournot Economic Pricing Model for Caching Resource Management in 5G Wireless Networks
Bouchaib Assila, Abdellatif Kobbane, Mohammed El Koutbi · 2018
The growth of mobile multimedia content consumption opens up a competitive market where the products are digital multimedia provided by the content providers. The content caching capability is deployed as an extension to the small cell network (SCN) in a Cloud radio access network CRAN of the mobile operators. Mobile users and Internet of things IoT devices, as content requesters, will take advantage of emerging caching techniques and fog computing to accomplish the ondemand services that require high throughput and large amount of computing resources. In this perspective, the mobile operators and contents providers find themselves linked in this market profit generating, and consequently in competition for caching contents in shared space storage owned by multiple mobile operators and setting price issues. The economic component of the caching service adds more stringent constraints to the classical learning and prediction algorithms to estimate the content popularity. We formulate this problem as an oligopolistic multimarket Cournot model and use a non-cooperative dynamic game to obtain the optimal amount of caching space. In a dynamic play, contents providers gradually and iteratively adapt their strategies according to their previous strategies and information provided by the consumers. The Nash equilibrium and the stability state of the dynamic play will be proved. Finally, the simulation results are presented to show the performance of the distribution scheme of proposed dynamic caching resources over classical learning and prediction algorithms.