The caching and pricing strategy for information-centric networking with advertisers' participation

As users' access to the network has evolved into the acquisition of mass contents instead of IP addresses, the IP network architecture based on end-to-end communication cannot meet users' needs. Therefore, the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) came into being. From a technical point of view, ICN is a promising future network architecture. Researching and customizing a reasonable pricing mechanism plays a positive role in promoting the deployment of ICN. The current research on ICN pricing mechanism is focused on paid content. Therefore, we study an ICN pricing model for free content, which uses game theory based on Nash equilibrium to analysis. In this work, advertisers are considered, and an advertiser model is established to describe the economic interaction between advertisers and ICN entities. This solution can formulate the best pricing strategy for all ICN entities and maximize the benefits of each entity. Our extensive analysis and numerical results show that the proposed pricing framework is significantly better than existing solutions when it comes to free content.