Content Delivery in Converged Network: Reward Sharing or Not?

The demands of video traffic transmission have grown rapidly in recent years. The emergence of converged network alleviates heavy burden on cellular network by introducing broadcasting. The transmission cost of contents with large demands can be effectively reduced. The content distribution strategy compromising between broadcasting and unicasting plays an important role in improving the performance of the converged network. To this end, we formulate the content delivery in a converged network by a game with three players, which are broadcast network service provider, unicast network service provider and a content provider. The cooperation without reward sharing among these players is formulated as a Stackelberg game. In this game, the two service providers are leaders to determine their transmission prices in a competitive way. The content provider is the follower to decide the content distribution strategy. Its Nash Equilibrium is derived consequently. In addition, we investigate the cooperation with reward sharing among the three players by introducing Shapley Value model. According to numerical results, it shows that the proposed Shapley Value based reward sharing scheme can improve the fairness of network cooperation. The gain of content provider using converged strategy over single mode transmission is validated as well.