Cooperative Inter-Domain Cache Sharing for Information-Centric Networking via a Bargaining Game Approach

Caching popular content locally has been shown to be an efficient way for internet service providers (ISPs) to reduce transit fees and improve the quality of their services. Recently, with the development of information-centric networking, content-peering, which allows peering ISPs to access each other's cache, has attracted interest. However, due to the economic structure and policy routing of the internet, content peering is only applicable between settlement-free peering ISPs, which constraints the benefit of inter-domain cache sharing. In this study, we consider extending the inter-domain cache sharing to ISPs with different tiers; this is done to take full advantage of the caching resources. Specifically, we identify the special properties of the inter-domain cache-sharing market with ISPs of different tiers, analyze the ISPs’ interactions, and employ Nash bargaining solutions to address the resource allocation issues in the market. In addition, we present decentralized algorithms to realize the proposed mechanism for large-scale networks. We show the correctness of the proposed method through rigorous analysis, and we verify the benefits to ISPs by carrying out extensive experiments.