Virtually all of the rapidly increasing data traffic consumed by mobile users requires some kind of processing, normally performed at cloud servers. A recent thrust, mobile edge computing , moves such processing to servers within the cellular mobile network. The large temporal and spatial variations to which mobile data usage is subject could make the reduced latency that edge clouds offer come at an unacceptable cost in redundant and underutilized infrastructure. We present some first empirical results on this question, based on large scale sampled crowd-sourced traces from several major cities spanning multiple operators and identifying the applications in use. We find opportunities to obtain both high server utilization and low application latency, but the best approaches will depend on the individual network operator's deployment strategy and geographic specifics of the cities we study.
Not many works exist that combine real-world traces and mobile edge computing. Among the most recent ones, @cite_1 studies the price (in terms of additional infrastructure) of deploying caches within the cellular core network. Compared to this study, @cite_1 only focuses on caching and vehicular traffic, and it only considers the dataset for the city of Los Angeles.
@cite_1
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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. 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. Vehicular users are expected to consume large amounts of data, for both entertainment and navigation purposes. This will put a strain on cellular networks, which will be able to cope with such a load only if proper caching is in place, this in turn begs the question of which caching architecture is the best-suited to deal with vehicular content consumption. In this paper, we leverage a large-scale, crowd-collected trace to (i) characterize the vehicular traffic demand, in terms of overall magnitude and content breakup, (ii) assess how different caching approaches perform against such a real-world load, (iii) study the effect of recommendation systems and local contents. We define a price-of-fog metric, expressing the additional caching capacity to deploy when moving from traditional, centralized caching architectures to a "fog computing" approach, where caches are closer to the network edge. We find that for location-specific contents, such as the ones that vehicular users are most likely to request, such a price almost disappears. Vehicular networks thus make a strong case for the adoption of mobile-edge caching, as we are able to reap the benefit thereof -- including a reduction in the distance traveled by data, within the core network -- with little or no of the associated disadvantages. 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.