On allocating cache resources to content providers

Abstract

In-network cache deployment is recognized as an effective technique for reducing content access delay. Caches serve content from multiple content providers, and wish to provide them differentiated services due to monetary incentives and legal obligations. Partitioning is a common approach in providing differentiated storage services. In this paper, we propose a utility-driven cache partitioning approach to cache resource allocation among multiple content providers, where we associate with each content provider a utility that is a function of the hit rate to its content. A cache is partitioned into slices with each partition being dedicated to a particular content provider. We formulate an optimization problem where the objective is to maximize the sum of weighted utilities over all content providers through proper cache partitioning, and mathematically show its convexity. We also give a formal proof that partitioning the cache yields better performance compared to sharing it. We validate the effectiveness of cache partitioning through numerical evaluations, and investigate the impact of various factors (e.g., content popularity, request rate) on the hit rates observed by contending content providers.