A Pricing Scheme for Content Caching in 5G Mobile Edge Clouds

The endeavor to develop 5G technology aims to support the recent outstanding mobile data traffic growth. In this regard, mobile network providers will be able to leverage on cloud edge-caching to offer services with enhanced quality of experience on the move. By this technology, dedicated cache space of mobile networks can be provisioned to OTT content providers, e.g., over metropolitan areas covered the network of a mobile network provider. In this work we address the problem of fair pricing such caching service, with storage the actual shared resource for caching. We study a scheme in which contents are dynamically stored in the edge memory. The mobile network provider offers a price λ for storing contents on the shared cache, thus engendering competition for cache memory sharing among content providers. We model such competition among OTT content providers using the economic notion of Kelly mechanism. Hence, we have studied the Stackelberg equilibrium, i.e., the optimal price configuration for the network provider. Numerical results describe the structure of the Nash equilibrium and the optimal prices resulting from the network provider optimal strategy.