Dynamic Edge Caching with Popularity Drifting

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the rate of content popularity change impacts broadcast transmission needs in edge caching, proposing coded schemes that leverage cached content to reduce bandwidth in 5G networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamic coloring algorithm extending index coding schemes to multiple requests, optimizing cache updates amid popularity drifts.

Findings

Significant bandwidth savings demonstrated through simulations.

Effective coded transmission schemes leveraging cached content as side information.

Adaptation of index coding to dynamic, multi-request scenarios.

Abstract

Caching at the network edge devices such as wireless caching stations (WCS) is a key technology in the 5G network. The spatial-temporal diversity of content popularity requires different content to be cached in different WCSs and periodically updated to adapt to temporal changes. In this paper, we study how the popularity drifting speed affects the number of required broadcast transmissions by the MBS and then design coded transmission schemes by leveraging the broadcast advantage under the index coding framework. The key idea is that files already cached in WCSs, which although may be currently unpopular, can serve as side information to facilitate coded broadcast transmission for cache updating. Our algorithm extends existing index coding-based schemes from a single-request scenario to a multiple-request scenario via a "dynamic coloring" approach. Simulation results indicate that a significant bandwidth saving can be achieved by adopting our scheme.