2025/10/17 by Pranay Agarwal, Agarwal, Pranay, D. Manjunath +1
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Engineering · #Caching and Content Delivery #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Game Theory and Applications #ICT Impact and Policies #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.15373
openalex publication_date 2025/10/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The ubiquity of smartphones has fueled content consumption worldwide, leading to an ever-increasing demand for a better Internet experience. This has necessitated an upgrade of the capacity of the access network. The Internet service providers (ISPs) have been demanding that the content providers (CPs) share the cost of upgrading access network infrastructure. A public investment in the infrastructure of a neutral ISP will boost the profit of the CPs, and hence, seems a rational strategy. A CP can also make a private investment in its infrastructure and boost its profits. In this paper, we study the trade-off between public and private investments by a CP when the decision is made under different types of interaction between them. Specifically, we consider four interaction models between CPs -- centralized allocation, cooperative game, non-cooperative game, and a bargaining game -- and determine the public and private investment for each model. Via numerical results, we evaluate the impact of different incentive structures on the utility of the CPs. We see that the bargaining game can result in higher public investment than the non-cooperative and centralized models. However, this benefit gets reduced if the CPs are incentivized to invest in private infrastructure.