Caching Eliminates the Wireless Bottleneck in Video-Aware Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a caching-based transmission paradigm that leverages content reuse and device-to-device communication to significantly increase network throughput and alleviate wireless bottlenecks in video traffic.

Contribution

It introduces a new caching and D2D communication framework, with optimized storage and streaming policies, to enhance wireless network capacity for video delivery.

Findings

Network throughput can increase linearly with the number of users.

D2D communications outperform traditional base-station systems in throughput and outage tradeoffs.

Throughput can be improved by up to two orders of magnitude with realistic simulations.

Abstract

Cellular data traffic almost doubles every year, greatly straining network capacity. The main driver for this development is wireless video. Traditional methods for capacity increase (like using more spectrum and increasing base station density) are very costly, and do not exploit the unique features of video, in particular a high degree of {\em asynchronous content reuse}. In this paper we give an overview of our work that proposed and detailed a new transmission paradigm exploiting content reuse, and the fact that storage is the fastest-increasing quantity in modern hardware. Our network structure uses caching in helper stations (femto-caching) and/or devices, combined with highly spectrally efficient short-range communications to deliver video files. For femto-caching, we develop optimum storage schemes and dynamic streaming policies that optimize video quality. For caching on devices, combined with device-to-device communications, we show that communications within {\em clusters} of mobile stations should be used; the cluster size can be adjusted to optimize the tradeoff between frequency reuse and the probability that a device finds a desired file cached by another device in the same cluster. We show that in many situations the network throughput increases linearly with the number of users, and that D2D communications also is superior in providing a better tradeoff between throughput and outage than traditional base-station centric systems. Simulation results with realistic numbers of users and channel conditions show that network throughput (possibly with outage constraints) can be increased by two orders of magnitude compared to conventional schemes.