Game Theoretic Analysis for Joint Sponsored and Edge Caching Content Service Market

TL;DR

This paper models a joint sponsored and edge caching content service market using game theory, analyzing interactions among providers, operators, and users to optimize strategies and equilibrium outcomes in 5G networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint market model combining sponsored content and edge caching, analyzed through a three-stage Stackelberg game framework.

Findings

Existence of Stackelberg equilibrium validated.

Proposed sub-gradient algorithm converges to equilibrium.

Insights into strategic interactions among providers and users.

Abstract

With a sponsored content scheme in a wireless network, a sponsored content service provider can pay to a network operator on behalf of the mobile users/subscribers to lower down the network subscription fees at the reasonable cost in terms of receiving some amount of advertisements. As such, content providers, network operators and mobile users are all actively motivated to participate in the sponsored content ecosystem. Meanwhile, in 5G cellular networks, caching technique is employed to improve content service quality, which stores potentially popular contents on edge networks nodes to serve mobile users. In this work, we propose the joint sponsored and edge caching content service market model. We investigate an interplay between the sponsored content service provider and the edge caching content service provider under the non-cooperative game framework. Furthermore, a three-stage Stackelberg game is formulated to model the interactions among the network operator, content service provider, and mobile users. Sub-game perfect equilibrium in each stage is analyzed by backward induction. The existence of Stackelberg equilibrium is validated by employing the bilevel optimization programming. Based on the game properties, we propose a sub-gradient based iterative algorithm, which ensures to converge to the Stackelberg equilibrium.