An online placement mechanism for efficient delivery of User Generated Content

User Generated Content (UGC) is projected to make up a significant part of the total Internet traffic in the future. As such, it will significantly contribute to the total cost for Internet traffic worldwide. Arguably, UGC is a suitable content type for which the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can take initiative and enter the content delivery market. However, despite its significance, UGC content management has attracted very little research attention, and the existing works stop short of developing placement and delivery solutions for UGC. Hence, we are motivated to address this content type, and exploit its properties to support ISPs in making optimal placement decisions. Specifically, we leverage the inherent tie between UGC and social networking context, take into consideration the persistence limitation of UGC (in contrast to commercial content), and derive model with the objective to minimize power usage. Also, derived from the problem formulation, we propose an online algorithm which enables each ISP to individually decide which contents should be placed and served locally. We provide simulation results showing that the proposed algorithm performs close to optimal in terms of power used for content delivery.