Incentivizing Mobile Video Users With Data Sponsoring and Edge Caching

Recently, edge caching has emerged as a new data sponsoring scheme, where the devices on the edge network, e.g., 4G/5G base stations, cache video contents and directly delivery them to mobile video users. Such caching schemes have significantly decreased the backhaul congestion, reduce the delivery latency, thus attract more mobile video users and monetize a huge number of videos. In this paper, we consider a hybrid caching schemes system, which combines edge cache sponsoring (ECS) and traditional cellular data sponsoring (CDS), where the content providers display advertisements to mitigate the cellular data downloading expense and provide attractive contents for mobile video users. In the system, we investigate the cooperative scenario and the competitive scenario between the two sponsoring schemes, and a mobile video user can select one scheme or neither of them for the requests of a video. In the first scenario, we focus on achieving the maximal total benefit of content providers by optimizing CDS and ECS schemes together. In the second scenario, we separately optimize ECS and CDS schemes and maximize the benefits of corresponding content providers. To illustrate the effectiveness of the two scenarios, we formulate the system as a two-stage game: 1) in the first stage, content providers (i.e., leaders) choose the sponsor effort in sponsor schemes (cooperatively or competitively); 2) in the second stage, mobile video users (i.e., followers) select their sponsor preferences. We conduct numerical results to explore the sub-game perfect equilibrium and find that the joint utilization of the two sponsor schemes can benefit the mobile video users, i.e., when ECS and CDS compete with each other, MUs can benefit 36% ~ 140% more than the case where there exists only one sponsor scheme. While when CPs cooperate with each other, their total payoff is maximized, the mobile video users’ payoff also increases. Moreover, we find that ECS can benefit the content providers more than CDS when sponsor revenue is high, and this indicates that ECS is a promising sponsor scheme for the high-value contents.