Collaborative Caching for Video Streaming among Selfish Wireless Service Providers

Video streaming is now at the fingertips of mobile users with recent advances in wireless communications and mobile networking. Caching has been widely deployed by wireless service providers (WSPs) to facilitate video content dissemination. Yet, capacity provisioning of cache servers is challenging given dynamic user demands and limited wireless bandwidth resources available. With increased densities of wireless service deployment, it is common that mobile users are now covered by more than one WSP within a geographical region. This brings both challenges and opportunities towards a collaborative caching paradigm among cache servers that are deployed by different WSPs. This paper explores the benefits of collaborative caching for wireless video streaming services, addressing challenges related to both incentives and truthfulness of selfish WSPs. We propose a collaborative mechanism that aims to maximize the social welfare in the context of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auctions, which encourages cache servers to spontaneously cooperate for trading their resources in a self-enforcing manner. Results from simulations demonstrate significant performance improvements with respect to video streaming quality.