Content Caching for Shared Medium Networks Under Heterogeneous Users' Behaviours

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid caching scheme that combines coded and uncoded strategies to optimize content placement, significantly reducing server load in networks with diverse user behaviors and content popularity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hybrid caching scheme for heterogeneous user demands and preferences, with explicit formulas and optimization for improved performance.

Findings

Hybrid scheme reduces server load effectively.

Outperforms pure coded and uncoded caching methods.

Works well for both homogeneous and heterogeneous user preferences.

Abstract

Content caching is a widely studied technique aimed to reduce the network load imposed by data transmission during peak time while ensuring users' quality of experience. It has been shown that when there is a common link between caches and the server, delivering contents via the coded caching scheme can significantly improve performance over conventional caching. However, finding the optimal content placement is a challenge in the case of heterogeneous users' behaviours. In this paper we consider heterogeneous number of demands and non-uniform content popularity distribution in the case of homogeneous and heterogeneous user preferences. We propose a hybrid coded-uncoded caching scheme to trade-off between popularity and diversity. We derive explicit closed-form expressions of the server load for the proposed hybrid scheme and formulate the corresponding optimization problem. Results show that the proposed hybrid caching scheme can reduce the server load significantly and outperforms the baseline pure coded and pure uncoded and previous works in the literature for both homogeneous and heterogeneous user preferences.