On Designing a Profitable System Model to Harmonize the Tripartite Dissension in Content Delivery Applications

Abstract The popularity of commercial content delivery applications has led to dissension among three embroiled parties: Content Service Providers (CSPs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and End Users (EUs). This dissension is not only a technical problem but an economic problem. To harmonize this dissension, this paper takes live streaming as a typical content delivery application. It proposes a profitable system model that enables all three parties to enlarge their benefits with the help of a prevalent content delivery architecture integrated with edge caching and traffic engineering technologies. We model the interactions among CSPs, ISPs, and EUs as a tripartite game where more and more ISPs and CSPs are involved in the market. We introduce a pricing scheme that captures the application features. We study the tripartite game in different market scenarios and propose a dynamic three-stage Stackelberg game combined with the Cournot game that characterizes the interdependent, interactive, and competitive relationship among the three parties. Moreover, we investigate how the market competition motivates ISPs to upgrade the cache service infrastructure. Our theoretical analysis and empirical study show that the model can result in a win-win-win outcome.