A Swiss Army Knife for Dynamic Caching in Small Cell Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces qLRU-Δ, a versatile dynamic caching policy for dense small cell networks that optimizes performance without requiring inter-BS communication or prior knowledge of content popularity.

Contribution

The paper proposes qLRU-Δ, a novel caching policy that is adaptable, does not need inter-BS communication, and offers performance guarantees under stationary request processes.

Findings

qLRU-Δ improves caching efficiency in dense networks.

The policy performs well without prior knowledge of content popularity.

It supports coordinated multipoint transmission techniques.

Abstract

We consider a dense cellular network, in which a limited-size cache is available at every base station (BS). Coordinating content allocation across the different caches can lead to significant performance gains, but is a difficult problem even when full information about the network and the request process is available. In this paper we present qLRU-$\Delta$, a general-purpose dynamic caching policy that can be tailored to optimize different performance metrics also in presence of coordinated multipoint transmission techniques. The policy requires neither direct communication among BSs, nor a priori knowledge of content popularity and, under stationary request processes, has provable performance guarantees.