Analysing Costs and Benefits of Content Sharing in Cloud Storage

Content sharing is among the most important features of personal cloud storage. It allows users to easily send files to each other, as well as to perform collaborative work in almost real-time. Content sharing seems to attract users to cloud storage, but it comes with a cost: files need to be spread to many user devices, posing extra workload to servers in the cloud. Which pricing model should providers adopt to offer content sharing while remaining profitable? Answering this question is challenging as many factors affect users' and providers' interests. In this paper we take a first step towards answering it. We propose a payoff function that captures costs and benefits of content sharing for both users and providers. We then apply the function to analyze the feasibility of a new pricing model for content sharing. In this new model, users receive credits if they offer upstream bandwidth for providers. Our preliminary results show that this pricing model is advantageous, leading to an increase on payoff of more than 4% for users and providers.