Incentivizing efficient content placement in a global content oriented network

With the primacy of content driving the design of new network architectures as well as the successful CDN business model, it is instructive to reconsider problems of content placement from the context of ISPs. In particular, we focus on a near-term future where architectural support for content has become more explicit, or where ISPs have become more proactive in incorporating content hosting into their business model, or both. In such a global content oriented network, studying the economic incentives for ISPs to focus on content placement and hosting, comes to the fore. In this paper, we consider the incentives for efficient content placement in a global content oriented network. We argue for a model of the content placement decisions made by transit ISPs as a cooperative game, and present a Shapley-value based mechanism to incentivize ISPs to place contents efficiently. We argue that with such a mechanism, ISPs have incentives both to cooperate to maximize surplus, and to employ placement strategies aligned with the global welfare. Our simulations give preliminary evidence that our proposed mechanism could profitably be applied in the near-term Internet, and based on extrapolations of some widely observed trends, become even more profitable for ISPs on longer time horizons.