Mobility-Aware Caching for Content-Centric Wireless Networks: Modeling and Methodology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for mobility-aware caching in content-centric wireless networks, leveraging user mobility patterns to improve caching efficiency at base stations and user terminals.

Contribution

It presents a general framework that identifies key mobility properties and proposes design methodologies for enhancing caching strategies in CCWNs.

Findings

Identified useful mobility pattern properties for caching

Proposed methodologies for mobility-aware caching design

Illustrated framework with two detailed examples

Abstract

As mobile services are shifting from "connection-centric" communications to "content-centric" communications, content-centric wireless networking emerges as a promising paradigm to evolve the current network architecture. Caching popular content at the wireless edge, including base stations (BSs) and user terminals (UTs), provides an effective approach to alleviate the heavy burden on backhaul links, as well as lowering delays and deployment costs. In contrast to wired networks, a unique characteristic of content-centric wireless networks (CCWNs) is the mobility of mobile users. While it has rarely been considered by existing works in caching design, user mobility contains various helpful side information that can be exploited to improve caching efficiency at both BSs and UTs. In this paper, we present a general framework on mobility-aware caching in CCWNs. Key properties of user mobility patterns that are useful for content caching will be firstly identified, and then different design methodologies for mobility-aware caching will be proposed. Moreover, two design examples will be provided to illustrate the proposed framework in details, and interesting future research directions will be identified.