Bandwidth-Cache Pricing for Caching-Assisted Video Streaming Delivery

Currently, it is still challenging for Video Streaming Service Providers (VSSPs) to develop advanced video delivery in wireless communications due to the limitation of network resources. In this paper, we propose a pricing strategy to effectively allocate heterogeneous resources, including transmission bandwidth and caching space, to improve users' Quality of Experience (QoE). Due to the properties of the two-hop video streaming model we propose, a video can be partially cached in the local storages to provide low waiting time and avoid playback interrupt. To design the pricing strategy for two heterogeneous resources, we first quantitatively analyzing the QoE with partial video caching by adopting diffusion approximation with stochastic data arrival. Based on the above QoE model, we develop an ascending auction framework for pricing heterogeneous resources. Furthermore, we prove that our proposed pricing strategy achieves asymptotically optimal social surplus and e-incentive compatibility. Finally, simulation results show that our proposed pricing strategy can achieve better performance on the social surplus compared to the conventional pricing strategies.