Exploiting User Mobility for Wireless Content Delivery

TL;DR

This paper addresses optimizing content storage in base stations considering user mobility modeled by Markov chains, aiming to minimize reliance on the main station for timely content delivery.

Contribution

It introduces an optimal storage allocation method for small deadlines and a distributed approximation algorithm for general cases, validated by real-world data experiments.

Findings

Optimal solution is efficiently attainable for small deadlines.

Proposed algorithms significantly reduce main base station usage.

Experimental results confirm effectiveness on real data.

Abstract

We consider the problem of storing segments of encoded versions of content files in a set of base stations located in a communication cell. These base stations work in conjunction with the main base station of the cell. Users move randomly across the space based on a discrete-time Markov chain model. At each time slot each user accesses a single base station based on it's current position and it can download only a part of the content stored in it, depending on the time slot duration. We assume that file requests must be satisfied within a given time deadline in order to be successful. If the amount of the downloaded (encoded) data by the accessed base stations when the time deadline expires does not suffice to recover the requested file, the main base station of the cell serves the request. Our aim is to find the storage allocation that minimizes the probability of using the main base station for file delivery. This problem is intractable in general. However, we show that the optimal solution of the problem can be efficiently attained in case that the time deadline is small. To tackle the general case, we propose a distributed approximation algorithm based on large deviation inequalities. Systematic experiments on a real world data set demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. Index Terms: Mobility-aware Caching, Markov Chain, MDS Coding, Small-cell Networks