Cellular Offloading via Downlink Cache Placement

TL;DR

This paper optimizes downlink file transmission using wireless cache nodes within a finite lifetime, modeling requests as a Poisson process and applying a Markov decision process with a novel low-complexity solution.

Contribution

It introduces a revised Bellman's equation for random-stage MDPs and proposes an analytical, low-complexity approximation method for cache-assisted downlink transmission optimization.

Findings

Significant resource reduction at the base station.

Effective approximation of the value function.

Validated by simulation results.

Abstract

In this paper, the downlink file transmission within a finite lifetime is optimized with the assistance of wireless cache nodes. Specifically, the number of requests within the lifetime of one file is modeled as a Poisson point process. The base station multicasts files to downlink users and the selected the cache nodes, so that the cache nodes can help to forward the files in the next file request. Thus we formulate the downlink transmission as a Markov decision process with random number of stages, where transmission power and time on each transmission are the control policy. Due to random number of file transmissions, we first proposed a revised Bellman's equation, where the optimal control policy can be derived. In order to address the prohibitively huge state space, we also introduce a low-complexity sub-optimal solution based on an linear approximation of the value function. The approximated value function can be calculated analytically, so that conventional numerical value iteration can be eliminated. Moreover, the gap between the approximated value function and the real value function is bounded analytically. It is shown by simulation that, with the approximated MDP approach, the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the resource consumption at the base station.