Joint Sponsor Scheduling in Cellular and Edge Caching Networks for Mobile Video Delivery

The explosive growth of mobile video traffic introduces new challenges for the network infrastructure. Edge caching, as one of the key technologies in 5G wireless networks, has shown great potential to improve the quality of mobile video services by reducing the transmission overhead over backhaul links. With edge caching, content providers (CPs) need to decide not only the traditional data sponsoring strategy on cellular networks (where CPs cover part or all of the mobile users' cellular data cost), but also a novel cache sponsoring strategy on the edge caching networks (where CPs place part of contents on edge networks in advance). In this paper, we study the joint optimization of both sponsors on cellular and edge caching networks for a single CP, aiming at maximizing the CP's revenue. Specifically, we formulate the joint optimization problem as a two-stage sequential decision problem. In stage I, the CP determines the edge caching policy (for a relatively long time period). In stage II, the CP decides the real-time data sponsoring strategy for each content request within the period. We analyze this two-stage decision problem systematically. First, we propose an online sponsoring strategy in stage II based on Lyapunov optimization framework. Then, we propose an edge caching strategy in stage I via predicting the number of aggregate user requests. Simulations on real data traces show that such a joint optimization policy can increase the CP's revenue by 124%-154%, comparing with the traditional data sponsoring policy (i.e., without edge caching). Moreover, the proposed online strategy can achieve 90% of the maximum revenue in the offline benchmark.