An EPEC Analysis among Mobile Edge Caching, Content Delivery Network and Data Center

Mobile edge caching (MEC), content delivery network (CDN) and data center (DC) serve Internet content providers (ICPs) with different advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we propose an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints (EPEC) to investigate the delivery strategies for files and pricing mechanisms for MEC, CDN, and DC. At the upper level, MEC and CDN predict the files’ rational delivery strategies and set the delivery price for each byte to provide the content delivery service. DC serves as origin servers to provide free content delivery service. At the lower level, the files observe the price strategy and determine their delivery strategies. In the proposed EPEC problem, there exist Nash equilibriums, which are coupled with each other, at both the upper level and lower level. We adopt a block coordinate descent (BCD) method to find the equilibrium solutions at both the upper level and lower level. Simulation results show that our proposed approach yields high utilities at the equilibrium.