Economic Incentives in Content-Centric Networking : Implications for Protocol Design and Public Policy

Many proposals for a future Internet architecture envision widely distributed caches within the network that facilitate delivery of named-data. Such proposals, generally referred to as content-centric networking (CCN), aim to address some challenges of the current Internet namely lack of data persistence, security and efficient in-network content delivery support. However, previous work in this area has largely ignored issues such as the incentives of different network players to deploy CCN architectures and the policy implications of deploying content-centric networks. In this paper, we develop a simple economic model to assess the incentives of various players to partake in a content-centric network and the factors that affect these incentives. We find that networks will place caches at different points in the network depending on the inter-domain routing policy. Furthermore, results from our model suggest that, in general, networks may not have incentives to deploy the socially optimal number of in-network caches unless there is some explicit monetary compensation from publishers for doing so. However, the level of compensation required to make in-network cache provisioning economically viable differs for different network players. Specifically, we show that when a publisher’s willingness to pay for caching services does not depend on the type of network that provides the service, then eyeball networks enjoy a significant competitive advantage in pricing caching services for first-time purchasers, provided all the end - users are concentrated in a single network. However, when end-users are distributed in multiple eyeball networks, then eyeball networks become less competitive in pricing caching services. Thus, it is likely that eyeball networks will invest in caching up to the point where transparent caching makes economic sense. Above this threshold, eyeball networks will rely on CDNs and transit networks to provide caching services and extract as much rent as possible by properly adjusting the fees they charge the CDNs and transit networks to co-locate and terminate traffic. Consequently, we find that competition to offer caching services to publishers will play out between transit networks and CDNs. In addition, our model lays out conditions under which CDNs can compete with transit networks that provide caching services in a CCN ecosystem. These conditions help us to explain recent observations such as Level 3 Communication’s ability to under-price Akamai Technologies to deliver Netfix’s video content. Finally, we identify and discuss CCN protocol design considerations and policy interventions that may be necessary to ensure a desirable socio-economic outcome from deploying CCNs