Cooperative Edge Caching in Software-Defined Hyper-Cellular Networks

To satisfy rapidly increasing multimedia service requests from mobile users, content caching at the network edges (e.g., base stations) has been regarded as a promising technique in future mobile networks. In this paper, by virtue of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with respect to solving complicated control problems, we propose a framework on Double Deep Q-Network for cooperative edge caching in mobile networks. Particularly, we aim at minimizing the long-term average content fetching delay of mobile users without requiring any priori knowledge of content popularity distribution. Trace-driven simulation results show that our proposed framework outperforms some existing caching algorithms, including Least Recently Used (LRU), Least Frequently Used (LFU) and First-In First-Out (FIFO) caching strategies by 7%, 11% and 9% improvements, respectively. Besides, our proposed work is further shown that only average 4% performance loss exists compared to an omniscient oracle algorithm.

Caching at the network edge has emerged as a promising technique to cope with the dramatic increase of mobile data traffic. It is noted that different types of video applications on mobile devices have different requirements for cached contents, thus corresponding caching policies should be developed accordingly. In hyper-dense heterogeneous networks, due to the user mobility and limited connection duration, the user often could not download the complete cached contents from an associated SBS before it moves away, which makes the design of caching strategy more challenging. In this paper, we propose two different caching strategies to adapt to multimedia applications of different video contents. For ordinary network video files, coded caching is used to increase the efficiency of content access. The caching problem is formulated as an optimization problem to minimize the average transmission cost of cached contents. We first present an optimal caching strategy based on the critical value of validity period of user requests. Then, for the validity period greater than its critical value, an iterative optimization on the basis of the above optimal solution is performed. For typical streaming video, uncoded video fragments is considered to be stored in the caches to meet the needs of online viewing. The principle of the proposed caching scheme is to cache data chunks in advance according to the sequences of SBSs passed by the user based on the mobility prediction results. Simulation results indicate that the proposed mobility-based caching performs better than the existing popularity-based caching scheme.

Device-to-device (D2D)caching has recently been proposed as a promising solution to alleviate the traffic burden for cellular networks. In such D2D caching-enabled networks, the cache strategy including where to cache and how to cache has a substantial impact on the system performance in terms of traffic offloading. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive cooperative caching strategy based on deep learning and social relationship, aiming at effectively reducing the traffic load of D2D cellular networks. An optimization problem is formulated to maximize the data offloading ratio by finding appropriate caching nodes and designing content placement strategies. To find the solution, a heuristic algorithm including content request prediction and content placement is developed. For content request prediction, we propose a method based on the neural network collaborative filtering (NCF)algorithm, which can improve the prediction accuracy by fusing recommendation algorithm and deep learning. For content placement, we develop a multi-user cooperative caching mechanism based on the social relationship and user activity level. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed caching policy can achieve effective data offloading.

Caching content of small base stations (SBSs) is a promising approach in the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks for decreasing the transmission delay and energy consumption. The key issue in caching is effective cooperation among SBSs for full usage of the caching to reduce the systems cost. In this paper, we first introduce the architecture of wireless cellular networks with caching in 5G. We divide the caching space into two parts: One caches the fixed content purchased by telecom operators from the remote service providers, and the other one caches contents for wireless transmission. Then, we propose the cooperative caching scheme based on content-exchanged, where each user can get its demanded data from either local SBS or purchasing the contents stored in the neighboring cooperative SBSs. We further prove the concavity of system costs regarding to the proportion between the two parts. We also propose a mechanism to search for the minimal system costs. Finally, by simulations, we prove that the performance of our proposed cooperative caching scheme is better than that of the traditional cache schemes without purchasing the contents between SBSs.

This paper studies a multi-tier cache-aided relaying network, where the destination <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$D$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is randomly located in the network and it requests files from the source <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S$ </tex-math></inline-formula> through the help of cache-aided base station (BS) and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> relays. In this system, the multi-tier architecture imposes a significant impact on the system collaborative caching and file delivery, which brings a big challenge to the system performance evaluation and optimization. To address this problem, we first evaluate the system performance by deriving analytical outage probability expression, through fully taking into account the random location of the destination and different file delivery modes related to the file caching status. We then perform the asymptotic analysis on the system outage probability when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is high, to enclose some important and meaningful insights on the network. We further optimize the caching strategies among the relays and BS, to improve the network outage probability. Simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the derived analytical and asymptotic outage probability for the proposed caching strategy. In particular, the proposed caching is superior to the conventional caching strategies such as the most popular content (MPC) and equal probability caching (EPC) strategies.

The major objective of mobility management is to achieve efficient contents transfer for mobile nodes. Content Centric Networking (CCN), as a content-oriented architecture, is designed for efficient content delivery which can easily provide mobility management based on content caching. Caching schemes of CCN deeply influences the content acquisition efficiency and whole network performance. However, the existing cache policies are relatively stiff and lack of comprehensive consideration in terms of users and contents. As a result, the performance of caching cannot dynamically adapt to the change of users' demand for content items. In this paper, we propose a Classification-Based Wisdom Caching (CBWC) scheme for CCN, which can distinguish the regional correlation of user requests and reasonably organize cache content items according to the need of users in different regions. We evaluate the CBWC scheme and the results indicate that the proposed CBWC scheme can improve the hit rate of cache and optimize the users' quality of experience, which can be further improve the performance of mobility management.

With caching popular contents at the small-cell base stations (SBSs), cooperative edge caching has emerged as an effective approach to offload explosively increasing network traffic from a massive number of users in mobile edge networks (MENs). However, most previous works ignored impact of user mobility on caching strategy, thus having limited practical applications. How to improve the caching strategy by exploiting user mobility is still a challenging problem. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a mobility-aware and cooperative coded caching (MoCoCoCa) for achieving traffic offloading in MENs, by considering user mobility and hard service deadline constraints. Specifically, we first develop the MoCoCoCa framework to satisfy users' requests locally and conduct the construction of access trajectory set via random walks on a Markov chain, which takes the randomness of contact into account. Then, based on user mobility predictions, we formulate the caching problem into a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem to minimize the load of core network, subject to finiteness of network resources (e.g., storage capacity, transmission rate) and non-uniformity of content popularity constraints. The objective function's submodular property is proved and a cooperative placement algorithm is given, which can achieve (1-1/e) -optimality. Furthermore, to adapt the given content placement configuration to the spatio-temporal dynamics of realtime request flow, the original placement problem is decomposed into some independent subproblems of content placement at individual SBSs. Each subproblem is converted into a submodular optimization problem, and a request-aware distributed replacement algorithm with linear computational complexity is proposed. Trace-based simulations and numerical results demonstrate that our proposed caching strategy can offload up to 69% network traffic than existing caching strategies.

Hyper-cellular network (HCN) architecture was proposed based on the separation of traffic and control coverage. In this paper, we mainly focus on the decoupling structure for traffic and control coverage. We also provide the decoupling principle with accompanying conditions and examples. With this knowledge, we discuss two key problems in the control process. For channel estimation under partial measurement, based on channel correlation between the spatial and time domain, we propose two channel prediction methods. One method is using traffic base-stations (BSs) to periodically measure channels and make decisions. The other is online and offline learning-based channel prediction. As for the massive connectivity problems in control coverage, sparse coding multiple access is adopted as a grant-free access method to support massive connectivity, low latency, and high reliability for control coverage.

The mobile edge caching is a promising way to reduce the user-perceived delay and improve the transmission data rates for the wireless networks. However, the cache capacities of base stations (BSs) tend to be limited and users’ interests for the contents are diverse, which makes the content placement decision critical for the network performance optimization. Besides, due to the flexible user-BS association, it is more complicated to optimize the content delivery and placement which are coupled with each other. This paper investigates the content placement and content delivery strategies in the cache-enabled wireless networks. In particular, the effective capacity , which can characterize the end-to-end user-perceived delay and data rates simultaneously, is introduced as the user’s utility metric. As the content caching and content delivery operate in different time-scales, they are investigated separately. For the content caching, a content placement problem is formulated, where both users’ different active levels and diverse content preferences are considered. Due to the NP-hard nature, the problem is decomposed into two sub-problems, and an iterative association-aware content placement algorithm is proposed. For the content delivery, the user-BS association problem is formulated, and a cache-aware user-BS association algorithm is designed. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated based on the simulations. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithms have a better capability to cope with users’ diverse active levels, and achieve a better performance in terms of effective capacity and fairness level, compared with the existing algorithms.

The integrated satellite-terrestrial network is promising to provide global broadband communication service. However, the long propagation delay of satellite-terrestrial links will lead to high communication delay when users access the Internet via satellites. In this paper, we investigate the cooperative multilayer edge caching in the integrated satellite-terrestrial network to reduce the communication delay, in which the base station cache, the satellite cache, and the gateway cache cooperatively provide content service for ground users. We first propose the three-layer cooperative caching model of the network, based on which we analyze the content retrieving process and derive the cache hit probability for different caching locations. Considering limited cache sizes, we formulate the content placement problem to minimize the average content retrieving delay of users. Then, two caching strategies, the non-cooperative caching strategy and the cooperative caching strategy, are proposed with exhaustive theoretical analysis. By introducing the concept of delay reduction gains, the optimal caching strategies are obtained based on the proposed iterative algorithms. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed cooperative caching architecture and the caching strategies.

Content caching at base stations (BSs) is a promising technique for future wireless networks by reducing network traffic and alleviating server bottleneck. However, in practice, the content popularity distribution may change with spatio-temporal variation but be unknown for BSs, which is an intractable obstacle for efficient caching strategy design. In this paper, considering unknown popularity distribution, we explore the content caching problem by jointly optimizing the content caching in cooperative BSs, content sharing among BSs, and cost of content retrieving. We tackle the problem from a multi-armed bandit learning perspective, where the learning of the popularity distribution is incorporated with the content caching and sharing process. Specifically, we first propose a centralized algorithm by employing a semidefinite relaxation approach, and we prove that this centralized algorithm learns efficient caching by deriving a sub-linear learning regret bound. To further reduce computational complexity, we propose a distributed algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers, where each BS only solves their own problems by exchanging local information with neighbor BSs. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of learning content popularity distributions of individual BSs, offloading traffic from the content server, and reducing cost of content retrieving.

The 6G vision further expands the breath and depth of network coverage, which is a challenge for the existing ground cellular network. Satellite-terrestrial integrated network with wide coverage ability and seamless access can significantly improve the ground cellular network performance. However, the limited cache and power resources and the complexity of satellite-terrestrial integrated network infrastructures enlarge seriously the burden of backhaul link, which degrades the energy efficiency. In this paper, we consider a satellite-terrestrial cooperative caching network (STCCN) with sharing links and propose the cooperative transmission scheme based on rateless codes to improve the energy efficiency. We analyze the traffic offloading and the energy consumption in STCCN, and formulate the optimization problem about maximizing the energy efficiency under the constraint of cache capacity and power consumption. Then, we use a proposed cooperative content placement algorithm (CCPA) to obtain the optimal content placement matrix. Numerical simulation results show that, our proposed scheme can improve energy efficiency obviously compared with other caching schemes.

Caching on the edge has been recognized as an effective solution to tackle the backhaul constraint of network densification. However, most related works ignored user mobility in wireless networks, which is unreasonable under the background of network densification. For a more flexible and context-aware caching decision, the concept of caching on the edge can be extended to mobile edge computing (MEC) that enables computation and storage resources at mobile edge networks. With MEC servers deployed on base stations, a huge amount of collected radio access network context data can be analyzed and utilized to render a caching scheme adaptive to user’s context-aware information. In this regard, a novel mobility-aware coded probabilistic caching scheme is proposed for MEC-enabled small cell networks (SCNs). Different from previous mobility-aware caching schemes, user mobility and distributed storage are incorporated into a conventional probabilistic caching scheme, with the aim of throughput maximization. Based on stochastic geometry theory and a modified mobility model of discrete random jumps, the explicit expression of throughput is derived. Due to the complexity of the expression, two light-weight heuristic algorithms are provided to numerically obtain the optimal solutions. Moreover, a significant trade-off among the gains of mobility diversity, content diversity, and channel selection diversity is discussed, and we further numerically analyze how such a trade-off is influenced by user mobility, content popularity, and backhaul capacity, with some fundamental insights into the application of the proposed scheme in MEC-enabled SCNs. The superiority of our proposed scheme is demonstrated by the comparisons with the classical M most popular caching scheme and the conventional probabilistic caching scheme. Numerical results show that our proposed caching scheme achieves higher throughput than those of the other two, especially when users of intense mobility request contents, of which the popularity profile is not skewed, in MEC-enabled SCNs with poor backhaul capacity, indicating that the proposed caching scheme is a promising solution for network densification.

Content Centric Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (CCMANET) applies the advantages of Content Centric networking (CCN) into Mobile Ad Hoc Network(MANET) to overcome the drawbacks of low efficiency and unstable in transmission. Caching scheme is one of the key components of CCMANET. However, the caching scheme in CCMANET has not been well explored. In this paper, a novel cooperative caching scheme based on generalized dominating set and local content popularity for CCMANET is proposed. First, a virtual backbone in CCMANET is constructed by generalized dominating set to make the arbitrary topology become two-level hierarchy and a collaborative cache placement scheme between the two hierarchies is designed. Second, we propose a method of computing the local content popularity and a cache replacement scheme based on the local content popularity. Simulation results show that the proposed caching scheme can effectively reduces both path stretch value and server load, and improves the hit ratio compared with the existing caching schemes.

This paper addresses the four enabling technologies, namely multi-user sparse code multiple access (SCMA), content caching, energy harvesting, and physical layer security for proposing an energy and spectral efficient resource allocation algorithm for the access and backhaul links in heterogeneous cellular networks. Although each of the above mentioned issues could be a topic of research, in a real situation, we would face a complicated scenario where they should be considered jointly, and hence, our target is to consider these technologies jointly in a unified framework. Moreover, we propose two novel content delivery scenarios: 1) single frame content delivery (SFCD), and 2) multiple frames content delivery (MFCD), where the time duration of serving user requests is divided into several frames. In the first scenario, the requested content by each user is served over one frame. However, in the second scenario, the requested content by each user can be delivered over several frames. We formulate the resource allocation for the proposed scenarios as optimization problems where our main aim is to maximize the energy efficiency of access links subject to the transmit power and rate constraints of access and backhaul links, caching and energy harvesting constraints, and SCMA codebook allocation limitations. Due to the practical limitations, we assume that the channel state information values between eavesdroppers and base stations are uncertain and design the network for the worst case scenario. Since the corresponding optimization problems are mixed integer non-linear and nonconvex programming, NP-hard, and intractable, we propose an iterative algorithm based on the well-known alternate and successive convex approximation methods. In addition, the proposed algorithms are studied from the computational complexity, convergence, and performance perspectives. Moreover, the proposed caching scheme outperforms the existing traditional caching schemes like random caching and most popular caching. We also study the effect of joint and disjoint considerations of enabling technologies for the performance of next-generation networks. On the one hand, our proposed caching strategy increases slightly the computational complexity by 3%, 1.1%, and 2% compared to no caching, SFCD, and disjoint solution, respectively. On the other hand, the proposed caching scheme achieves a performance gain of 43%, 9.4%, and 51.3% compared to the three state-of-the-art schemes.