MDP-based Network Friendly Recommendations

Controlling the network cost by delivering popular content to users, as well as improving streaming quality and overall user experience, have been key goals for content providers (CP) in recent years. While proposals to improve performance, through caching or other mechanisms (DASH, multicasting, etc.) abound, recent works have proposed to turn the problem on its head and complement such efforts. Instead of trying to reduce the cost to deliver every possible content to a user, a potentially very expensive endeavour, one could leverage omnipresent recommendations systems to nudge users towards the content of low(er) network cost, regardless of where this cost is coming from. In this paper, we focus on this latter problem, namely optimal policies for “Network Friendly Recommendations” (NFR). A key contribution is the use of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework that offers significant advantages, compared to existing works, in terms of both modeling flexibility as well as computational efficiency. Specifically we show that this framework subsumes some state-of-the-art approaches, and can also optimally tackle additional, more sophisticated setups. We validate our findings with real traces that suggest up to almost 2X in cost performance, and 10X in computational speed-up compared to recent state-of-the-art works.