Performance of Caching-Based D2D Video Distribution with Measured Popularity Distributions

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the throughput--outage tradeoff of caching-based D2D video distribution using real-world popularity data from BBC iPlayer, demonstrating potential for significant performance improvements in practical cellular networks.

Contribution

First analysis of caching-based D2D video distribution using measured demand distributions, confirming theoretical scaling laws with real-world data.

Findings

Order-of-magnitude throughput improvements are achievable.

Scaling laws match those in existing literature.

Practical setups retain theoretical benefits.

Abstract

On-demand video accounts for the majority of wireless data traffic. Video distribution schemes based on caching combined with device-to-device (D2D) communications promise order-of-magnitude greater spectral efficiency for video delivery, but hinge on the principle of `concentrated demand distributions.' This paper presents, for the first time, the analysis and evaluations of the throughput--outage tradeoff of such schemes based on measured cellular demand distributions. In particular, we use a dataset with more than 100 million requests from the BBC iPlayer, a popular video streaming service in the U.K., as the foundation of the analysis and evaluations. We present an achievable scaling law based on the practical popularity distribution, and show that such scaling law is identical to those reported in the literature. We find that also for the numerical evaluations based on a realistic setup, order-of-magnitude improvements can be achieved. Our results indicate that the benefits promised by the caching-based D2D in the literature could be retained for cellular networks in practice.