The Role of Caching in Future Communication Systems and Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores the significance of content caching in future communication networks, reviewing existing solutions, identifying challenges, and highlighting its potential to significantly enhance network performance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of caching techniques, discusses new research directions, and analyzes industry challenges to advance caching in future networks.

Findings

Caching can significantly improve network performance.

Technical challenges hinder caching deployment.

Industry perspectives highlight key bottlenecks.

Abstract

This paper has the following ambitious goal: to convince the reader that content caching is an exciting research topic for the future communication systems and networks. Caching has been studied for more than 40 years, and has recently received increased attention from industry and academia. Novel caching techniques promise to push the network performance to unprecedented limits, but also pose significant technical challenges. This tutorial provides a brief overview of existing caching solutions, discusses seminal papers that open new directions in caching, and presents the contributions of this Special Issue. We analyze the challenges that caching needs to address today, considering also an industry perspective, and identify bottleneck issues that must be resolved to unleash the full potential of this promising technique.