Near-Optimal Content Service Algorithm with Procurement and Placement in Edge Networks

Telecom carriers have announced new content services by making a partnership with content providers and offered popular video streaming to customers. Via the integration with edge networks, telecom carriers can procure various contents from content providers and place them on edge servers proximate to end users to serve real-time requests with high bandwidth and ultra-low latency. Nevertheless, it is challenging to consider the content procurement, placement, and services jointly due to the user preference, user distribution, storage capacity of edge server, economic costs, etc. Telecom carriers would like to balance the procuring, placing, and transfer costs. To address this problem, the paper formulates an optimization problem and then proposes an approximation algorithm. Finally, the simulation results manifest that our algorithm outperforms other baselines.