Caching at mobile devices can facilitate device-to-device (D2D) communications, which may significantly improve spectrum efficiency and alleviate the heavy burden on backhaul links. However, most previous works ignored user mobility, thus having limited practical applications. In this paper, we take advantage of the user mobility pattern by the inter-contact times between different users, and propose a mobility-aware caching placement strategy to maximize the data offloading ratio, which is defined as the percentage of the requested data that can be delivered via D2D links rather than through base stations (BSs). Given the NP-hard caching placement problem, we first propose an optimal dynamic programming (DP) algorithm to obtain a performance benchmark, but with much lower complexity than exhaustive search. We will then prove that the problem falls in the category of monotone submodular maximization over a matroid constraint, and propose a time-efficient greedy algorithm, which achieves an approximation ratio as 1 2. Simulation results with real-life data-sets will validate the effectiveness of our proposed mobility-aware caching placement strategy. We observe that users moving at either a very low or very high speed should cache the most popular files, while users moving at a medium speed should cache less popular files to avoid duplication.
Compared with caching at BSs @cite_11 @cite_35 @cite_47 @cite_28 @cite_2 @cite_32 @cite_26 @cite_49 , caching at mobile devices provides new features and unique advantages. First, the aggregate caching capacity grows with the number of devices in the network, and thus the benefit of device caching improves as the network size increases @cite_37 . Second, by caching popular content at devices, mobile users may acquire required files from close user devices via D2D communications, rather than through the BS @cite_5 @cite_39 . This will significantly reduce the mobile traffic on the backbone network and alleviate the heavy burden on the backhaul links. However, mobile caching also faces some new challenges. Specifically, not only the users, but also the caching helpers are moving over time, which brings additional difficulties in the caching design.
@cite_35 @cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_28 @cite_32 @cite_39 @cite_49 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_47 @cite_11
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Caching at mobile devices can facilitate device-to-device (D2D) communications, which may significantly improve spectrum efficiency and alleviate the heavy burden on backhaul links. However, most previous works ignored user mobility, thus having limited practical applications. In this paper, we take advantage of the user mobility pattern by the inter-contact times between different users, and propose a mobility-aware caching placement strategy to maximize the data offloading ratio , which is defined as the percentage of the requested data that can be delivered via D2D links rather than through base stations. Given the NP-hard caching placement problem, we first propose an optimal dynamic programming algorithm to obtain a performance benchmark with much lower complexity than exhaustive search. We then prove that the problem falls in the category of monotone submodular maximization over a matroid constraint, and propose a time-efficient greedy algorithm, which achieves an approximation ratio as @math . Simulation results with real-life data sets will validate the effectiveness of our proposed mobility-aware caching placement strategy. We observe that users moving at either a very low or very high speed should cache the most popular files, while users moving at a medium speed should cache less popular files to avoid duplication. 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. We suggest a novel approach to handle the ongoing explosive increase in the demand for video content in mobile devices. We envision femtocell-like base stations, which we call helpers, with weak backhaul links but large storage capabilities. These helpers form a wireless distributed caching network that assists the macro base station by handling requests of popular files that have been cached. We formalize the wireless distributed caching optimization problem for the case that files are encoded using fountain MDS codes. We express the problem as a convex optimization. By adding additional variables we reduce it to a linear program. On the practical side, we present a detailed simulation of a university campus scenario covered by a single 3GPP LTE R8 cell and several helper nodes using a simplified 802.11n protocol. We use a real campus trace of video requests and show how distributed caching can increase the number of served users by as much as 600–700 . We consider a wireless device-to-device (D2D) network where the nodes have precached information from a library of available files. Nodes request files at random. If the requested file is not in the on-board cache, then it is downloaded from some neighboring node via one-hop local communication. An outage event occurs when a requested file is not found in the neighborhood of the requesting node, or if the network admission control policy decides not to serve the request. We characterize the optimal throughput-outage tradeoff in terms of tight scaling laws for various regimes of the system parameters, when both the number of nodes and the number of files in the library grow to infinity. Our analysis is based on Gupta and Kumar protocol model for the underlying D2D wireless network, widely used in the literature on capacity scaling laws of wireless networks without caching. Our results show that the combination of D2D spectrum reuse and caching at the user nodes yields a per-user throughput independent of the number of users, for any fixed outage probability in (0, 1). This implies that the D2D caching network is scalable: even though the number of users increases, each user achieves constant throughput. This behavior is very different from the classical Gupta and Kumar result on ad hoc wireless networks, for which the per-user throughput vanishes as the number of users increases. Furthermore, we show that the user throughput is directly proportional to the fraction of cached information over the whole file library size. Therefore, we can conclude that D2D caching networks can turn memory into bandwidth (i.e., doubling the on-board cache memory on the user devices yields a 100 increase of the user throughout).