Efficient Joint Bandwidth and Cache Leasing in Information Centric Networks

nformation Centric Networking (ICN) is a novel paradigm that aims at improving the performance of today's Internet by providing universal caching and multicast content delivery. In this paper we propose a strategy to stimulate third parties to jointly lease the unused bandwidth and storage available on wireless access points in an ICN. We formulate this problem as a combinatorial reverse auction run by a content provider willing to increase the number of users reached by his service. We first show that the optimal allocation algorithm is NP-hard, we then provide greedy heuristics that guarantee the individual rationality and truthfulness properties and we compare their performance numerically. Finally, we evaluate the benefits of our proposed mechanisms in terms of the computational time necessary to execute the allocation algorithms, as well as the cost savings for the content provider obtained by offloading the backhaul connections using the distributed caches to directly serve users' requests. The novelty of our approach is to simultaneously take into account in the mechanism design the bandwidth as well as the storage available at the access network, and to study their mutual interaction.