Content Delivery Networks as a Virtual Network Function: A Win-Win ISP-CDN Collaboration

The switch in video delivery from traditional medium to Over-The-Top (OTT) based services has been a game changer for stakeholders of the media delivery ecosystem. It has changed the value chain enabling Content Delivery Networks and Content Providers to take the lion's share at the expense of Internet/Network Service Providers. Even if establishing collaboration between them naturally appears as the key to provide good Quality of Service to the end-users, they struggle in finding efficient and fair ways to do so. This paper directly tackles this problem and proposes a new model for content delivery actors to collaborate over a Virtualized Infrastructure, fairly balancing the revenue stream created. We list the main challenges and the new technical opportunities to solve them, among which the deployment of a distributed Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform at the edge of the Internet Service Provider's network where a virtual Content Delivery Network (vCDN) is proposed to be deployed. Furthermore, we apply a game-theoretic analysis to study different ISP-CDN collaboration models and identify optimality conditions for our proposed CDN-as-a-Virtual-Network-Function approach.