Media delivery competition with edge cloud, remote cloud and networking
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Media delivery competition with edge cloud, remote cloud and networking Xinyi Hu1 · George Kesidis1 · Behdad Heidarpour2 · Zbigniew Dziong2 Accepted: 28 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We describe a marketplace for content (digital media) distribution, specifically stored-video streaming, involving both edge cloud (fog) and remote cloud-computing and storage resources. Three different types of competing participants are considered: providers that are affiliated with the remote cloud, those that are affiliated with the ISP/edge, and those affiliated with neither. For a simple model, we explore the existence of a Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we formulate a leader-follower game involving a market regulator maximizing social welfare and study its Stackelberg equilibrium. For a market regulator seeking to limit prices charged by an edge-cloud entrant, we show an interesting trade-off between “moderate” edge-cloud prices and the existence of a follower (Nash) equilibrium. Keywords Content distribution · Edge cloud · Fog · Nash equilibrium · Stackelberg game
This research was supported by NSF CNS grant 1526133. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the 2018 NETGCOOP Conference [14]. Xinyi Hu
[email protected] George Kesidis [email protected] Behdad Heidarpour [email protected] Zbigniew Dziong [email protected] 1
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
2
´ ´ Ecole de Technologie Sup´erieure (ETS), Montreal, Canada
X. Hu et al.
1 Introduction A primary objective of network neutrality regulations is to address antitrust concerns, promote fair competition and innovation, and reduce costs for consumers [7, 11, 33]. Complicating the role of eyeball ISPs [22] concerning the content (digital media) they handle is the fact that many are themselves also content providers (over “managed services” they provide to their end-users) and content creators, and thus in competition with some content providers (CPs) that they enable over their commodity Internet service. Though this is a growing trend, considering AT&T’s recent attempt to acquire Time-Warner, the growth of Google Fi in America, and Facebook’s Express WiFi e.g., in India, some content providers/producers, e.g., Netflix, are not (yet) themselves a subsidiary of a network provider. Since the onset of the neutrality debate1 , researchers have extensively studied parsimonious models of the Internet marketplace to gain insight into the economic forces in play, especially to study the effects on competition (including barriers to market entry) and costs-to-end-users of non-neutral actions by ISPs. Performance is often assessed based on the Bertrand-Nash equilibria (NE) of noncooperative, decentralized games, and in terms of dynamical convergence to these equilibria, often considering limited resources (particularly bandwidth) as in classical Cournot games [5, 10]. The role of the regulator can be considered using a Stackelberg (leaderfollowers) game framework (
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