A Framework of Cooperative Cell Caching for the Future Mobile Networks
Xiaofei Wang, Xiuhua Li, Victor C. M. Leung, Panos Nasiopoulos
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
{xfwang, lixiuhua, vleung, panos}@ece.ubc.ca
Abstract
The demand for rich multimedia services over
mobile networks has been soaring at a tremendous
pace over recent years. However, the wireless link
capacity as well as the bandwidth of the radio access
networks and the backhaul network cannot practically
cope with the explosive growth in mobile traffic load.
In this article, we mainly focus on a new novel
framework of cooperative cell caching for future
mobile cellular networks, where the base station of
each cell can have certain capability of caching
popular contents. Then we carry out necessary
theoretical modeling-based analysis. We also propose
to utilize prefix-tree aggregation to improve the
caching performance among cells, and discuss
potential deployment issues for caching in 5G mobile
networks. Based on trace-driven simulations, we
evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.
1. Introduction
Due to the fast development of mobile networking
and wireless communication technologies, an
increasing number of users tend to download contents
on mobile devices, such as reading articles and
watching videos on phones and tablets. The mobile
Internet traffic has been explosively growing with the
increasing demand for massive content distribution and
large amounts of media resources. This sudden growth
of traffic load poses a significant burden and thus
challenge for current infrastructure of Internet service
providers (SPs); particularly, the enormous amount of
mobile traffic poses significant pressure on current
mobile networks, especially the radio access network
and the backhaul network.
This ever-increasing traffic load becomes a serious
concern of mobile network operators (MNOs), but
studies in [1] [2] and [3] have pointed out that a large
portion of the traffic load is due to the downloads of
the same popular files. For instance, top 10% of videos
in YouTube account for nearly 80% of all the views
[2].
Therefore, the networking devices in the radio access
networks and backbone networks of mobile operators
have to suffer from sending the same files at multiple
times unnecessarily.
At present, effective ways of reducing mobile
traffic load are highly desired. Indeed, despite the
continuous efforts of MNOs and network equipment
vendors to enhance the wireless link bandwidth by
adopting sophisticated techniques at both the physical
(PHY) layer and medium access control (MAC) layers
in Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced
systems, such as massive multiple-input multiple-
output (MIMO), carrier aggregation, and coordinated
multipoint (CoMP) transmission, the utilization
efficiency of the radio spectrum is notably reaching its
theoretical cap.
Among many emerging techniques and novel
proposals, efficient content caching has drawn an
increasing attention and is regarded as an effective
method for reducing the duplicated downloads via the
backbone networks and cellular links, as caching
popular contents inside the mobile networks can
significantly reduce the duplicated transmissions of
files among and within MNOs while offering a better
service quality (e.g., delay) to mobile users. Note that
throughout this paper, we will use “SP” and “MNO”
interchangeably as they are mostly the same entity in
many countries.
Moreover, both academia and industry have been
investigating effective ways to reduce the duplicate
content transmissions by adopting intelligent caching
strategies inside the mobile networks, and enabling
mobile users to access popular contents from caches of
nearby MNO gateways (e.g., using selective IP traffic
offload techniques [4]). From the perspective of
MNOs, this also helps reduce traffic exchanged inter-
and intra-SPs [5], not to mention significant reduction
in the response time required to fetch a content file.
Thus, the impact of Internet traffic dynamics on
variation of the response latency can be eliminated.
2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
1530-1605/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2015.635
5404