Joint Proactive Content Delivery And Sponsorship In Mobile Communication Networks

The measured data shows that content delivery has become one of the most important applications of broadband mobile communication network.With the surge in data traffic demand,how to improve the overall utilization of the communication network and reduce the consumption cost per unit of data content is an urgent problem to be solved.Personalized proactive content delivery and content sponsorship are effective ways to solve this problem.Previous studies have shown that proactive content delivery can improve network utilization and network performance.Sponsored content can reduce users'traffic payment and increase content provider's(CP's)revenue.The existing researches relevant to combination of these two methods are still rare.In this paper,proactive content delivery and sponsored content are unified in the same framework for research,and a joint proactive content delivery and sponsorship scheme is proposed to maximize the profit of CP,reduce users'traffic payment and improve the utilization of network capacity.The main contributions of this paper include two aspects.First,based on the differentiated intelligent communication pipes and the predictability of user behavior,the scheme of joint proactive content delivery and sponsorship is formulated as a maximization problem of CP's profit,and users'traffic payment and operator's profit are also modeled.The framework of this paper jointly considers the factors of user response to sponsorship strategy,user cache capacity,redundant capacity prices and the impact of sponsored content on the network load.We propose a heuristic algorithm to obtain the approximate optimal values of pre-push and sponsorship to users for CP,and systematically evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.Simultaneously,we compare and analyze CP's gain in the situations without any policies,only with sponsorship or only with proactive delivery.Secondly,considering the expansion from single-slot system to multi-slot system,we study the scheme of joint multi-slot proactive content delivery and sponsorship,and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the approximate optimal solution of the extended scheme.The impact of the proactive window size on system performance under the constraints of user cache capacity and different user response factors is analyzed.The simulation results show that when the operator makes reasonable pricing for the secondary traffic,the proposed solution can not only improve CP's profit,but also reduce users' traffic payment,and can further improve overall utilization of the network while improving operator's profit.