The recent surge of applications involving the use of @math video challenges mobile networks infrastructure, as @math video files are of significant size, and current delivery and edge caching architectures are unable to guarantee their timely delivery. In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint collaborative content-aware caching and delivery of @math videos. The proposed scheme takes advantage of @math video encoding in multiple tiles and layers to make fine-grained decisions regarding which tiles to cache in each Small Base Station (SBS), and from where to deliver them to the end users, as users may reside in the coverage area of multiple SBSs. This permits to cache the most popular tiles in the SBSs, while the remaining tiles may be obtained through the backhaul. In addition, we explicitly consider the time delivery constraints to ensure continuous video playback. To reduce the computational complexity of the optimization problem, we simplify it by introducing a fairness constraint. This allows us to split the original problem into subproblems corresponding to Groups of Pictures (GoP). Each of the subproblems is then decoupled into their caching and routing components and solved with the method of Lagrange partial relaxation. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method for various system parameters and compare it with schemes that do not consider @math video encoding into multiple tiles and quality layers. The results make clear the benefits coming from caching and delivery decisions on per tile basis.
Edge caching has been proposed as an efficient way to improve the performance of cellular networks in terms of the observed delivery delay @cite_25 @cite_33 @cite_38 @cite_22 @cite_13 @cite_17 , energy consumption @cite_20 , and operating cost @cite_9 . These benefits of edge caching are attributed to the fact that only a small portion of available content accounts for most of the traffic load @cite_19 . Hence, by caching the most popular content at the SBSs, significant resources are saved. In @cite_30 , it is explored how to capture content popularity dynamics among the various caches by using at each SBS the information about its neighboring SBSs. The impact of content request patterns and users' behavior on edge caching-assisted mobile video streaming of real-life data sets is studied in @cite_10 .
@cite_30 @cite_38 @cite_22 @cite_33 @cite_10 @cite_9 @cite_19 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_20 @cite_17
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Caching at the edge is a promising technique to cope with the increasing data demand in wireless networks. This paper analyzes the performance of cellular networks consisting of a tier macro-cell wireless backhaul nodes overlaid with a tier of cache-aided small cells. We consider both static and dynamic association policies for content delivery to the user terminals and analyze their performance. In particular, we derive closed-form expressions for the area spectral efficiency and the energy efficiency, which are used to optimize relevant design parameters such as the density of cache-aided small cells and the storage size. By means of this approach, we are able to draw useful design insights for the deployment of highly performing cache-aided tiered networks. To alleviate the pressure brought by the explosion of mobile video traffic on present cellular networks, small cell base stations (SBSs) with caching ability are introduced. In this letter, we consider the caching strategy of scalable video coding streaming over heterogeneous wireless network containing SBSs. We formulate an integer programming problem to minimize the average download time under the constraint of cache size at each SBS, and show that finding the optimal caching placement strategy is NP-hard. Heuristic solution was proposed based on the convex programming relaxation, which reveals the structural properties of cache allocation for each video. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed caching strategies acquire significant performance gain compared with conventional caching policy. Caching has emerged as a vital tool in modern communication systems for reducing peak data rates by allowing popular files to be pre-fetched and stored locally at end users' devices. With the shift in paradigm from homogeneous cellular networks to the heterogeneous ones, the concept of data offloading to small cell base stations (sBS) has garnered significant attention. Caching at these small cell base stations has recently been proposed, where popular files are pre-fetched and stored locally in order to avoid bottlenecks in the limited capacity backhaul connection link to the core network. In this paper, we study distributed caching strategies in such a heterogeneous small cell wireless network from a reinforcement learning perspective. Using state of the art results, it can be shown that the optimal joint cache content placement in the sBSs turns out to be a NP-hard problem even when the sBS's are aware of the popularity profile of the files that are to be cached. To address this problem, we propose a coded caching framework, where the sBSs learn the popularity profile of the files (based on their demand history) via a combinatorial multi-armed bandit framework. The sBSs then pre-fetch segments of the Fountain-encoded versions of the popular files at regular intervals to serve users' requests. We show that the proposed coded caching framework can be modeled as a linear program that takes into account the network connectivity and thereby jointly designs the caching strategies. Numerical results are presented to show the benefits of the joint coded caching technique over naive decentralized cache placement strategies. Anticipating multimedia file requests via caching at the small cell base stations (SBSs) of a cellular network has emerged as a promising technique for optimizing the quality of service (QoS) of wireless user equipments (UEs). However, developing efficient caching strategies must properly account for specific small cell constraints, such as backhaul congestion and limited storage capacity. In this paper, we address the problem of devising a usercell association, in which the SBSs exploit caching capabilities to overcome the backhaul capacity limitations and enhance the users’ QoS. In the proposed approach, the SBSs individually decide on which UEs to service based on both content availability and on the data rates they can deliver, given the interference and backhaul capacity limitations. We formulate the problem as a oneto-many matching game between SBSs and UEs. To solve this game, we propose a distributed algorithm, based on the deferred acceptance scheme, that enables the players (i.e., UEs and SBSs) to self-organize into a stable matching, in a reasonable number of algorithm iterations. Simulation results show that the proposed cell association scheme yields significant gains, reaching up to 21 improvement compared to a traditional cell association techniques with no caching considerations. Evidence indicates that downloading on-demand videos accounts for a dramatic increase in data traffic over cellular networks. Caching popular videos in the storage of small-cell base stations (SBSs), namely, small-cell caching, is an efficient technology for mitigating redundant data transmissions over backhaul channels in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). In this paper, we consider a commercialized small-cell caching system consisting of a video retailer (VR), multiple network service providers (NSPs), and mobile users (MUs). The VR leases its popular videos to the NSPs to make profits, and the NSPs, after placing these videos to their SBSs, can efficiently reduce the repetitive video transmissions over their backhaul channels. We study such a system within the framework of the Stackelberg game. We first model the MUs and SBSs as two independent Poisson point processes (PPPs) and develop the probability of the event that an MU can obtain the demanded video directly from the memory of an SBS. Then, based on the derived probability, we formulate a Stackelberg game to maximize jointly the average profit of the VR and the NSPs. Moreover, we investigate the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE) via solving an optimization problem. Numerical results are provided for verifying the proposed framework by showing its effectiveness on pricing and resource allocation. Small cells constitute a promising solution for managing the mobile data growth that has overwhelmed network operators. Local caching of popular content items at the small cell base stations (SBSs) has been proposed to decrease the costly transmissions from the macrocell base stations without requiring high capacity backhaul links for connecting the SBSs with the core network. However, the caching policy design is a challenging problem especially if one considers realistic parameters such as the bandwidth capacity constraints of the SBSs that can be reached in congested urban areas. We consider such a scenario and formulate the joint routing and caching problem aiming to maximize the fraction of content requests served locally by the deployed SBSs. This is an NP-hard problem and, hence, we cannot obtain an optimal solution. Thus, we present a novel reduction to a variant of the facility location problem, which allows us to exploit the rich literature of it, to establish algorithms with approximation guarantees for our problem. Although the reduction does not ensure tight enough bounds in general, extensive numerical results reveal a near-optimal performance that is even up to 38 better compared to conventional caching schemes using realistic system settings. We consider the problem of caching in next generation mobile cellular networks where small base stations (SBSs) are able to store their users' content and serve them accordingly. The SBSs are stochastically distributed over the plane and serve their users either from the local cache or internet via limited backhaul, depending on the availability of requested content. We model and characterize the outage probability and average content delivery rate as a function of the signal-to-interference-ratio (SINR), base station intensity, target file bitrate, storage size and file popularity. Our results provide key insights into the problem of cache-enabled small cell networks. Optimal cache content placement in a wireless small cell base station (sBS) with limited backhaul capacity is studied. The sBS has a large cache memory and provides content-level selective offloading by delivering high data rate contents to users in its coverage area. The goal of the sBS content controller (CC) is to store the most popular contents in the sBS cache memory such that the maximum amount of data can be fetched directly form the sBS, not relying on the limited backhaul resources during peak traffic periods. If the popularity profile is known in advance, the problem reduces to a knapsack problem. However, it is assumed in this work that, the popularity profile of the files is not known by the CC, and it can only observe the instantaneous demand for the cached content. Hence, the cache content placement is optimised based on the demand history. By refreshing the cache content at regular time intervals, the CC tries to learn the popularity profile, while exploiting the limited cache capacity in the best way possible. Three algorithms are studied for this cache content placement problem, leading to different exploitation-exploration trade-offs. We provide extensive numerical simulations in order to study the time-evolution of these algorithms, and the impact of the system parameters, such as the number of files, the number of users, the cache size, and the skewness of the popularity profile, on the performance. It is shown that the proposed algorithms quickly learn the popularity profile for a wide range of system parameters. Today’s Internet has witnessed an increase in the popularity of mobile video streaming, which is expected to exceed 3 4 of the global mobile data traffic by 2019. To satisfy the considerable amount of mobile video requests, video service providers have been pushing their content delivery infrastructure to edge networks—from regional content delivery network (CDN) servers to peer CDN servers (e.g., smartrouters in users’ homes)—to cache content and serve users with storage and network resources nearby. Among the edge network content caching paradigms, Wi-Fi access point caching and cellular base station caching have become two mainstream solutions. Thus, understanding the effectiveness and performance of these solutions for large-scale mobile video delivery is important. However, the characteristics and request patterns of mobile video streaming are unclear in practical wireless network. In this paper, we use real-world data sets containing 50 million trace items of nearly 2 million users viewing more than 0.3 million unique videos using mobile devices in a metropolis in China over two weeks, not only to understand the request patterns and user behaviors in mobile video streaming, but also to evaluate the effectiveness of Wi-Fi and cellular-based edge content caching solutions. To understand the performance of edge content caching for mobile video streaming, we first present temporal and spatial video request patterns, and we analyze their impacts on caching performance using frequency-domain and entropy analysis approaches. We then study the behaviors of mobile video users, including their mobility and geographical migration behaviors, which determine the request patterns. Using trace-driven experiments, we compare strategies for edge content caching, including least recently used (LRU) and least frequently used (LFU), in terms of supporting mobile video requests. We reveal that content, location, and mobility factors all affect edge content caching performance. Moreover, we design an efficient caching strategy based on the measurement insights and experimentally evaluate its performance. The results show that our design significantly improves the cache hit rate by up to 30 compared with LRU LFU. Endowed with context-awareness and proactive capabilities, caching users' content locally at the edge of the network is able to cope with increasing data traffic demand in 5G wireless networks. In this work, we focus on the energy consumption aspects of cache-enabled wireless cellular networks, specifically in terms of area power consumption (APC) and energy efficiency (EE). We assume that both base stations (BSs) and mobile users are distributed according to homogeneous Poisson point processes (PPPs) and we introduce a detailed power model that takes into account caching. We study the conditions under which the area power consumption is minimized with respect to BS transmit power, while ensuring a certain quality of service (QoS) in terms of coverage probability. Furthermore, we provide the optimal BS transmit power that maximizes the area spectral efficiency per unit total power spent. The main takeaway of this paper is that caching seems to be an energy efficient solution. Content caching on the edge of 5G networks is an emerging and critical feature to support the thirst for content of future connected cars. Yet, the compactization of 5G cells, the finite edge storage capacity and the need for content availability while driving motivate the need to develop smart edge caching strategies adapted to the mobility characteristics of connected cars. In this paper, we propose a Mobility-Aware Probabilistic (MAP) scheme, which optimally caches content at edge nodes where connected vehicles mostly require it. Unlike blind popularity decisions, the probabilistic caching used by MAP considers vehicular trajectory predictions as well as content service time by edge nodes. We evaluate our approach on realistic mobility datasets and against popularity-based edge approaches. Our MAP edge caching scheme provides up to 40 enhanced content availability, 70 increased cache throughput, and 40 reduced backhaul overhead compared to popularity-based strategies. In this work we investigate optimal geographical caching in heterogeneous cellular networks where different types of base stations (BSs) have different cache capacities. Users request files from a content library according to a known probability distribution. The performance metric is the total hit probability, which is the probability that a user at an arbitrary location in the plane will find the content that it requires in one of the BSs that it is covered by. We consider the problem of optimally placing content in all BSs jointly. As this problem is not convex, we provide a heuristic scheme by finding the optimal placement policy for one type of base station conditioned on the placement in all other types. We demonstrate that these individual optimization problems are convex and we provide an analytical solution. As an illustration, we find the optimal placement policy of the small base stations (SBSs) depending on the placement policy of the macro base stations (MBSs). We show how the hit probability evolves as the deployment density of the SBSs varies. We show that the heuristic of placing the most popular content in the MBSs is almost optimal after deploying the SBSs with optimal placement policies. Also, for the SBSs no such heuristic can be used; the optimal placement is significantly better than storing the most popular content. Finally, we show that solving the individual problems to find the optimal placement policies for different types of BSs iteratively, namely repeatedly updating the placement policies, does not improve the performance. Edge-caching, which only caches the contents near the users, has low implementation cost and performs comparably with the conventional on-path caching schemes in (ICN). However, the independent edge-caching can not capture the content popularity dynamics accurately since each cache node only has local content request information. In addition, the caching information of the cache nodes within the same neighborhood is not efficiently utilized. To solve these issues, we propose a coordinated edge-caching system, where the cache nodes within the same neighborhood can help each other to improve the caching performance. We design a caching decision method for each node, and the decision method takes caching information of edge nodes within the same neighborhood into consideration. We theoretically illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in typical network scenarios. Simulations are conducted on the real-world network topologies under both stationary and temporal popularity workloads, and the results show the performance of our proposed scheme is superior to the comparison schemes. Mobile edge caching enables content delivery directly within the radio access network, which effectively alleviates the backhaul burden and reduces round-trip latency. To fully exploit the edge resources, the most popular contents should be identified and cached. Observing that content popularity varies greatly at different locations, to maximize local hit rate, this paper proposes an online learning algorithm that dynamically predicts content hit rate, and makes location-differentiated caching decisions. Specifically, a linear model is used to estimate the future hit rate. Considering the variations in user demand, a perturbation is added to the estimation to account for uncertainty. The proposed learning algorithm requires no training phase, and hence is adaptive to the time-varying content popularity profile. Theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed algorithm asymptotically approaches the optimal policy in the long term. Extensive simulations based on real world traces show that, the proposed algorithm achieves higher hit rate and better adaptiveness to content popularity fluctuation, compared with other schemes. In this paper, we introduce distributed caching of videos at the base stations of the Radio Access Network (RAN) to significantly improve the video capacity and user experience of mobile networks. To ensure effectiveness of the massively distributed but relatively small-sized RAN caches, unlike Internet content delivery networks (CDNs) that can store millions of videos in a relatively few large-sized caches, we propose RAN-aware reactive and proactive caching policies that utilize User Preference Profiles (UPPs) of active users in a cell. Furthermore, we propose video-aware backhaul and wireless channel scheduling techniques that, in conjunction with edge caching, ensure maximizing the number of concurrent video sessions that can be supported by the end-to-end network while satisfying their initial delay requirements and minimize stalling. To evaluate our proposed techniques, we developed a statistical simulation framework using MATLAB and performed extensive simulations under various cache sizes, video popularity and UPP distributions, user dynamics, and wireless channel conditions. Our simulation results show that RAN caches using UPP-based caching policies, together with video-aware backhaul scheduling, can improve capacity by 300 compared to having no RAN caches, and by more than 50 compared to RAN caches using conventional caching policies. The results also demonstrate that using UPP-based RAN caches can significantly improve the probability that video requests experience low initial delays. In networks where the wireless channel bandwidth may be constrained, application of our videoaware wireless channel scheduler results in significantly (up to 250 ) higher video capacity with very low stalling probability. To alleviate the backhaul burden and reduce user-perceived latency, content caching at base stations has been identified as a key technology. However, the caching strategy design at the wireless edge is challenging, especially when both wired backhaul condition and wireless channel quality are considered in the optimization. In this paper, taking into account the conditions of the backhaul in terms of delay and wireless channel quality, joint design and optimization of the caching and user association policy to minimize the average download delay is studied in a cache-enabled heterogeneous network. We first prove the joint caching and association optimization problem is NP-hard based on a reduction to the facility location problem. Furthermore, in order to reduce the complexity, a distributed algorithm is developed by decomposing the NP-hard problem into an assignment problem solvable by the Hungarian method and two simple linear integer subproblems, with the aid of McCormick envelopes and the Lagrange partial relaxation method. Simulation results reveal a near-optimal performance that performs up to 22 better in term of delay compared with those in the literatures at a low complexity of @math . A heterogenous network with base stations (BSs), small base stations (SBSs), and users distributed according to independent Poisson point processes is considered. SBS nodes are assumed to possess high storage capacity and to form a distributed caching network. Popular files are stored in local caches of SBSs, so that a user can download the desired files from one of the SBSs in its vicinity. The offloading-loss is captured via a cost function that depends on the random caching strategy proposed here. The popularity profile of cached content is unknown and estimated using instantaneous demands from users within a specified time interval. An estimate of the cost function is obtained from which an optimal random caching strategy is devised. The training time to achieve an @math difference between the achieved and optimal costs is finite provided the user density is greater than a predefined threshold, and scales as @math , where @math is the support of the popularity profile. A transfer learning-based approach to improve this estimate is proposed. The training time is reduced when the popularity profile is modeled using a parametric family of distributions; the delay is independent of @math and scales linearly with the dimension of the distribution parameter. The ephemeral content popularity seen with many content delivery applications can make indiscriminate on-demand caching in edge networks highly inefficient, since many of the content items that are added to the cache will not be requested again from that network. In this paper, we address the problem of designing and evaluating more selective edge-network caching policies. The need for such policies is demonstrated through an analysis of a dataset recording YouTube video requests from users on an edge network over a 20-month period. We then develop a novel workload modelling approach for such applications and apply it to study the performance of alternative edge caching policies, including indiscriminate caching and cache on @math th request for different @math . The latter policies are found able to greatly reduce the fraction of the requested items that are inserted into the cache, at the cost of only modest increases in cache miss rate. Finally, we quantify and explore the potential room for improvement from use of other possible predictors of further requests. We find that although room for substantial improvement exists when comparing performance to that of a perfect “oracle” policy, such improvements are unlikely to be achievable in practice. Mobile cellular networks are becoming increasingly complex to manage while classical deployment optimization techniques and current solutions (i.e., cell densification, acquiring more spec­trum, etc.) are cost-ineffective and thus seen as stopgaps. This calls for development of novel approaches that leverage recent advances in storage memory, context-awareness, edge cloud computing, and falls into framework of big data. However, the big data by itself is yet another complex phenomena to handle and comes with its notorious 4V: Velocity, voracity, volume, and variety. In this work, we address these issues in optimization of 5G wireless networks via the notion of proactive caching at the base stations. In particular, we investigate the gains of proactive caching in terms of backhaul of-floadings and request satisfactions, while tackling the large-amount of available data for content popularity estimation. In order to estimate the content popularity, we first collect users' mobile traffic data from a Turkish telecom operator from several base stations in hours of time interval. Then, an analysis is carried out locally on a big data platform and the gains of proactive caching at the base stations are investigated via numerical simulations. It turns out that several gains are possible depending on the level of available information and storage size. For instance, with 10 of content ratings and 15.4 Gbyte of storage size (87 of total catalog size), proactive caching achieves 100 of request satisfaction and offloads 98 of the backhaul when considering 16 base stations. Caching popular contents at the edge of wireless networks has recently emerged as a promising technology to improve the quality of service for mobile users, while balancing the peak-to-average transmissions over backhaul links. In contrast to existing works, where a central coordinator is required to design the cache placement strategy, we consider a distributed caching problem which is highly relevant in dense network settings. In the considered scenario, each Base Station (BS) has a cache storage of finite capacity, and each user will be served by one or multiple BSs depending on the employed transmission scheme. A belief propagation based distributed algorithm is proposed to solve the cache placement problem, where the parallel computations are performed by individual BSs based on limited local information and very few messages passed between neighboring BSs. Thus, no central coordinator is required to collect the information of the whole network, which significantly saves signaling overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed low-complexity distributed algorithm can greatly reduce the average download delay by collaborative caching and transmissions.