Economic analysis of cache location in mobile network

As mobile networks are witnessing huge growth in the volumes of data traffic from smartphone and tablet. Mobile operators start to look into CDN and caching in order to offload increasingly overloaded mobile networks, reduce network and peering cost, and improve mobile user´s quality of experience. For CDN and cache deployment in mobile network, one practical issue is where to deploy CDN or cache function. As mobile network is designed as a tiered and hierarchical structure, the cache or CDN function could be placed at multiple potential points, e.g., GGSN, RNC and etc. In this paper, we propose an economic model that can be used to analyze the cost saving and benefit when cache function is place at different places of mobile network. A real mobile network is studied according to this model. We can see that the best place to store the cached content really depends on the network infrastructure and cost composition of the mobile operator. In addition, other issues, like technical complexity and performance, shall be considered together.