Intelligent edge CDN with smart contract-aided local IoT sharing

A content delivery network (CDN) aims to reduce the content delivery latency to end-users by using distributed cache servers. Nevertheless, deploying and maintaining cache servers on a large scale is very expensive. To solve this problem, CDN providers have developed a new content delivery strategy: allowing end-users’s IoT edge devices to share their storage/bandwidth resources. This new edge CDN platform must address two core questions: (1) how can we incentivize end users to share IoT devices? (2) how can we facilitate a safe and transparent content transaction environment for end users? This paper introduces SmartSharing, a new content delivery network solution to address these questions. In smartSharing, the over-the-top (OTT) IoT devices belonging to end-users are used as mini-cache servers. To motivate end users to share the idle devices and storage/bandwidth resources, SmartSharing designs the content delivery schedule and the pricing scheme based on game theory and machine learning algorithms (specifically, a tailored expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm). To facilitate content trading among end users, SmartSharing creates a secure and transparent transaction platform based on smart contracts in Ethereum. In addition, SmartSharing’s performance evaluation is through trace-driven simulations in the real world and a prototype using content metadata and the achieved pricing schemes. The evaluation results show that CDN providers, end users and content providers can all benefit from our SmartSharing framework.