Pricing Caching services with multiple levels of QoS

Summary form only given. Emerging caching techniques such as differential caching, push caching, etc enable preferential treatment of premium objects in a cache. By the use of appropriate placement, replacement or reporting policies, a service provider can offer multiple levels of QoS for different objects. For example, certain objects may be assigned higher priorities and be placed in a premium cache before they get pushed into the regular cache to increase their lifetime in the cache. Similar techniques open avenues for a service provider such as an IAP (Internet Access Provider) to offer several quality-differentiated services to content publishers at different prices and thus maximize revenues. We focus on the optimal pricing strategy of a caching service provider offering multiple quality levels. We analyze trade-offs between bandwidth savings and the potential to charge publishers for caching their content. We determine the optimum number of quality levels to offer and motivate a means for determining optimal allocation of the cache space among the different service classes.