The Economics of CDNs and Their Impact on Service Fairness

摘要: Content delivery networks (CDNs) have become key telecommunication actors. They contribute to improve significantly the quality of services delivering content end users. However, their impact on ecosystem raises concerns about “fairness,” and therefore question inclusion in neutrality debates, becomes relevant. This paper aims at analyzing a revenue-maximizing CDN some other major actors, namely, end-users, network operators, providers, comparing outcome with that fair behavior, providing tools investigate whether regulation should be introduced. We present mathematical model show there exists unique optimal policy for actor, terms dimensioning allocation its storage capacity, depending parameters such as prices service/transport/storage. Numerical experiments are then performed both synthetic data real traces obtained from video-on-demand provider. In addition, using traces, we compare revenue-based policies based several fairness criteria.