Content and Access Networks Synergies: Tradeoffs in Public and Private Investments by Content Providers

The ever-increasing demand for better Internet experience has necessitated an upgrade in the capacity of access networks. Internet service providers (ISPs) have been demanding that the content providers (CPs) share the cost of upgrading network infrastructure. A CP can make a public investment towards improving the ISP infrastructure to boost its revenue. A CP can also make a private investment in its infrastructure and boost its profits. In this work, we consider multiple CPs and a neutral ISP. We consider different models of interaction among CPs—centralized allocation, non-cooperative game, and bargaining game—and study the trade-off between a public and private investment of a CP 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.