Mobility-aware caching strategy in an SDN-based cooperative caching network

Abstract

The upsurge of mobile multimedia traffic puts a heavy burden on the cellular network, and wireless caching has emerged as a powerful technique to overcome the backhaul bottleneck and alleviate the network burden. However, most previous works ignored user mobility, thus not reaping the caching gain from user mobility and having limited practical applications. In this paper, a mobility-aware caching strategy for the software-defined network (SDN)-based network is studied. Firstly, since typical mobile user (MU) has multiple opportunities to connect with the nearby MUs and Small-base stations (SBSs), the contact times between MUs as well as between MU and SBSs are derived as the Poisson distribution and Gamma distribution. Secondly, we propose a two-tier cooperative caching strategy, where SBSs cache the rateless Fountain code encoded video blocks probabilistically and nonrepeatedly while MUs just store the whole encoded video received last time. The corresponding four-stage transmission process is analyzed, where the key intermediate step is the derivation of the service and the failing probabilities of each transmission manner. Finally, we derive the successful offloading rate and average data offloading ratio (ADOR) as performance metrics. A system optimization problem based on ADOR is formulated, and two solutions are proposed, namely, derivative-based solution (DB-Solution) and long-tail distribution approximation (LTD-Approximation). Simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness of LTD-Approximation is similar to the DB-Solution, and the proposed caching strategy can achieve quasi-optimal performance compared with other contrast schemes.