On the Incentive Mechanisms for Commercial Edge Caching in 5G Wireless Networks

Mobile data traffic has dramatically increased by a factor of around 100 over the last five years, while it is still expected to grow exponentially in the near future. Evidence indicates that the repetitive downloading of popular contents accounts for the increase in wireless traffic. This has consequently led to the development of edge caching technology for efficiently mitigating redundant transmissions from backbone networks by pre-caching frequently requested data at radio access networks. Among a variety of research topics in this field, the commercialization of edge caching has attracted augmented attention. In this article, we focus on the design of incentive mechanisms for commercial edge caching in 5G cellular networks, where the edge device providers (EDPs) and content providers (CPs) are the two counter-parties competing to maximize their own welfare. We first propose the architecture of a commercial caching system and analyze the revenue of the entities involved. Due to selfishness, each entity tries to achieve its highest benefit by squeezing profits from others, causing contentions of interest. Game theoretic approaches are then introduced to balance the conflicts. Four incentive frameworks are developed based on different categories of games in the context of the caching system. Afterward, we conduct case studies for three application scenarios to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed game models. Numerical results are also provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed game frameworks.