Collaborative Caching in Wireless Video Streaming Through Resource Auctions

Recent advances in wireless communications and mobile networking have dramatically increased the popularity of multimedia services for mobile users, with wireless video streaming at their fingertips. To facilitate efficient acquisition of video content, proxy caching has been widely used by wireless service providers (WSPs), which typically deploy cache servers at mobile switching centers (MSCs). However, capacity provisioning of cache servers is challenging, given the dynamic user demands and the limited cache server resources. With increased densities of wireless service deployment, it is increasingly common that mobile users are covered by more than one WSP within an area. This brings opportunities of a collaborative caching paradigm among the cache servers deployed at different MSCs. In this paper, we explore the benefits of collaborative caching in wireless streaming services, addressing both challenges of incentives and truthfulness of selfish WSPs. We propose a collaborative mechanism that maximizes the social welfare in the context of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auctions, in which cache servers cooperate in the trading of their resources in a self-enforcing manner. Experimental results demonstrate that superior performance can be achieved with respect to the quality of video streaming.