Envy-Free Resource Allocation and Request Routing in Hybrid CDN–P2P Networks

Hybrid CDN–P2P networks (HCDNs) combine Peer to Peer (P2P) networks and Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to benefit from their complementary advantages. In order to enable a traditional CDN to offer hybrid content delivery service, we introduce a resource scheduling mechanism to perform the request routing process and determine the desired level of contribution for users. The proposed mechanism relies on a truthful, profit maximizing, envy-free auction to optimize contributions of the end-users in P2P content delivery. Based on the proposed solution, economics of content delivery in the HCDN are studied and it is shown that through our resource scheduling mechanism, it is possible to serve a big fraction of end-users with higher quality content, increase the net profit of the HCDN provider, and decrease expenditures of the content provider simultaneously.