# Joint Location-Dependent Pricing and Request Mapping in ICN-Based Telco CDNs For 5G
## 1 Introduction
On the basis of the virtualized CDNaaS architecture, important resource allocation issues are studied, e.g., QoE-aware virtual computation/storage allocation [12; 13; 14], SLA-based virtual CDN (vCDN) embedding [15; 16], on-demand vCDN migration [17; 18]. In addition, content caching and user request mapping should be re-designed in the hierarchical and resource-constrained cloud architecture with traffic engineering purposes taken into account [19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28]. Besides the aspects mentioned above, efficient pricing strategies and precise profitability analysis are also essential for telco CDNs to ensure sustainable income, i.e., matching revenue to cost. The profitability of introducing CDN service in an MNO is studied in [29]. The economic impact of telco CDNs' federation is studied in [30]. In addition, pricing for cache has attracted much attention [31; 32; 33; 34]. Despite this, there is still no literature that focuses on bandwidth pricing in the context of telco CDN. Traditional CDNs adopt a unified percentile-based bandwidth pricing strategy among different CDN sites. Take Ali CDN as an example, the bandwidth pricing strategies across different CDN sites are unified on the Chinese mainland [35]. Nevertheless, the traditional bandwidth pricing strategy is not flexible and efficient enough for telco CDNs in the 5G era. The reasons are as follows. First, sites of the 5G era telco CDNs are deployed in access networks, thus a considerable amount of user requests can be satisfied within the access networks. Nevertheless, it has been shown that traffic in different access networks reveals spatial and temporal heterogeneity, which should be taken into account in the design of pricing strategies to reduce the peak-to-average ratio of the sites' bandwidth usage [36]. Second, telco have to manage their own bandwidth cost while ensuring service quality. When the average congestion level of CDN sites reaches a certain level, telco have to invest more to expand the sites' bandwidth capacity. Under this circumstance, a fixed pricing strategy does not provide enough economic incentives for capacity expanding. To address the above mentioned challenges, in this paper, we first propose a framework that integrates information-centric forwarding with a powerful caching service provided by telco CDNs,enabling more cost-efficient ICN-based telco CDNs. Then, we design a location-dependent pricing strategy (LDP) that considers the spatially heterogeneous features of traffic in geo-distributed telco CDN sites. If the variation of the sites' congestion level reaches a threshold, then the prices of the sites are set differently according to their relative congestion levels; whereas, if all sites are at a similar congestion level, then the prices are set the same according to the average congestion level. In addition, our design ensures that in both cases, the higher a site's congestion level is, the higher its bandwidth price is. This design of joint location dependent pricing and request mapping helps telco CDNs manage sites' bandwidth more efficiently and to better match revenue to cost. Specifically, the location-dependent design encourages more usage in under-utilized sites through setting lower prices. In contrast, for congested sites, it sets higher prices to let users pay more, thus its increasing bandwidth cost can be compensated. In particular, we make four contributions. * First, we propose an integrated framework for cost-efficient and effective deployment of ICN-based telco CDNs. Specifically, we propose to employ powerful off-path caching provided by telco CDNs to complement on-path caching in ICN. In our design, once a cache miss occurs at an ICN router, the content request is directed to the most suitable telco CDN site by the border router of the access network.