Economic Analysis of Joint Mobile Edge Caching and Peer Content Sharing

Mobile edge caching (MEC) allows edge devices to cache popular contents and deliver them to end-users directly, which can effectively alleviate increasing backbone loads and improve end-users’ quality of service. Peer content sharing (PCS) enables edge devices to share the cached contents with others, and can further increase the caching efficiency. While many efforts have been made to content caching or sharing technologies, it remains open to study the complicated technical and economic interplay between both technologies. In this paper, we propose a joint MEC-PCS framework, and focus on capturing the strategic interactions between different types of edge devices. Specifically, we model their interactions as a non-cooperative game, where each device (player) can choose to be an agent (who caches and shares contents with others) or a requester (who doesn’t cache but requests contents from others) of each content. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of the game equilibrium systematically under the generic usage-based pricing (for PCS). To address the incomplete information issue, we further design a behavior rule that allows players to achieve the equilibrium via a dynamic learning algorithm. Simulations show that the joint MEC-PCS framework can reduce the total system cost by 60%, compared with the benchmark pure caching system without PCS.