Joint Location-Dependent Pricing and Request Mapping in ICN-Based Telco CDNs For 5G

Telco content delivery networks (CDNs) have envisioned building highly distributed and cloudified sites to provide a high-quality CDN service in the 5G era. However, there are still two open problems to be addressed. First, telco CDNs are operated upon the underlay network evolving towards information-centric networking (ICN). Different from CDNs that perform on the application layer, ICN enables information-centric forwarding to the network layer. Thus, it is challenging to take advantage of the benefits of both ICN and CDN to provide a high-quality content delivery service in the context of ICN-based telco CDNs. Second, bandwidth pricing and request mapping issues in ICN-based telco CDNs have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we first propose an ICN-based telco CDN framework that integrates the information-centric forwarding enabled by ICN and the powerful edge caching enabled by telco CDNs. Then, we propose a location-dependent pricing (LDP) strategy, taking into consideration the congestion level of different sites. Furthermore, on the basis of LDP, we formulate a price-aware request mapping (PARM) problem, which can be solved by existing linear programming solvers. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of our design.