Caching Efficiency Enhancement at Wireless Edges with Concerns on User’s Quality of Experience

Abstract

Content caching is a promising approach to enhancing bandwidth utilization and minimizing delivery delay for new-generation Internet applications. The design of content caching is based on the principles that popular contents are cached at appropriate network edges in order to reduce transmission delay and avoid backhaul bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a cooperative caching replacement and efficiency optimization scheme for IP-based wireless networks. Wireless edges are designed to establish a one-hop scope of caching information table for caching replacement in cases when there is not enough cache resource available within its own space. During the course, after receiving the caching request, every caching node should determine the weight of the required contents and provide a response according to the availability of its own caching space. Furthermore, to increase the caching efficiency from a practical perspective, we introduce the concept of quality of user experience (QoE) and try to properly allocate the cache resource of the whole networks to better satisfy user demands. Different caching allocation strategies are devised to be adopted to enhance user QoE in various circumstances. Numerical results are further provided to justify the performance improvement of our proposal from various aspects.