An Economic Vision of Caching Issues in Content Delivery Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Content delivery network is an indispensable part of today’s value chain of content delivery. In the 4G era, telco companies operate CDN only for their own use. With the development of 5G, they have envisioned to re-architect CDN based on emerging technologies such as SDN and NFV to provide flexible and high-performance CDN service to multiple third parties. The unique
features of the new proposed architecture have attracted plenty of effort on several research aspects. Yet, there is still no literature to characterize the unique features of telco CDN and survey the existing publications. In this paper, we first give an overview of telco CDN in the 5G cloudified network architecture. Then, compared with traditional CDN, the unique features of telco CDN are illustrated. Next, we give a survey of existing work that addresses the new-arising problems in the development and operation of telco CDN. In addition, to aid the adopter’s decision-making when choosing CDN service, we conduct an economic case study to assess the cost that an adopter has to pay in telco CDN in comparison with that in traditional CDN.