Section: New Results

On ICN Cache Allocation to Content Providers

Contributor: Damien Saucez

Cross-Team Contributors: Mahmoud El Chamie (Maestro)

External contributors: Sahar Hoteit and Stefano Secci from Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06.

Information Centric Networks (ICNs) allow offloading content distribution from content service providers by means of in-network caching.  Despite a rather high maturation in the definition of ICN forwarding techniques, minor attention has been given to the strategic interaction among the multiple ICN stakeholders.  We decided to focus on situations involving multiple Content Providers (CPs) and one ICN provider having to give them access to its caches. Intuitively, this situation is prone to high cache contention, in particular at the appealing topology cross-points.  To address this problem we propose a resource allocation and pricing framework to support the network provider in the cache allocation to multiple CPs, for situations where CPs have non-overlapping sets of files and untruthful demands need to be avoided.  As cache imputations to CPs need to be fair and robust against overclaiming, we evaluated common proportional and max-min fairness (PF, MMF) allocation rules, as well as coalitional game rules, the Nucleolus and the Shapley value.  We found that the naive least-recently-used-based ICN approach provides proportional fairness.  Moreover, the game-theoretic rules outperform in terms of content access latency the naive ICN approach as well as PF and MMF approaches, while sitting in between PF and MMF in terms of fairness.  This paper is under submission [27] .