FemtoCaching: Wireless video content delivery through distributed caching helpers

By Negin Golrezaei, Karthikeyan Shanmugam, A. Dimakis, Andreas F. Molisch, Giuseppe Caire. 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM, 2011

772 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We suggest a novel approach to handle the ongoing explosive increase in the demand for video content in wireless/mobile devices. We envision femtocell-like base stations, which we call helpers, with weak backhaul links but large storage capacity. These helpers form a wireless distributed caching network that assists the macro base station by handling requests of popular files that have been cached. Due to the short distances between helpers and requesting devices, the transmission of cached files can be done very efficiently. A key question for such a system is the wireless distributed caching problem, i.e., which files should be cached by which helpers. If every mobile device has only access to a exactly one helper, then clearly each helper should cache the same files, namely the most popular ones. However, for the case that each mobile device can access multiple caches, the assignment of files to helpers becomes nontrivial. The theoretical contribution of our paper lies in (i) formalizing the distributed caching problem, (ii) showing that this problem is NP-hard, and (iii) presenting approximation algorithms that lie within a constant factor of the theoretical optimum. On the practical side, we present a detailed simulation of a university campus scenario covered by a single 3GPP LTE R8 cell and several helpers using a simplified 802.11n protocol. We use a real campus trace of video requests and show how distributed caching can increase the number served users by as much as 400 - 500%.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec5269a6de90647a7313480f93b041cf4f29899d

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on End-Edge-Cloud Orchestrated Network Computing Paradigms (2019, background): “Therefore, some works [11, 16, 61, 116] focus on the deployment of MBS caching and SBS caching.”
Wireless Device-to-Device Caching Networks: Basic Principles and System Performance (2013, background): “Essentially, such helper nodes are femto-BSs that use caching to replace the backhaul and thus obviate the need for the most expensive part of a small cell infrastructure [17].”
A Survey on Mobile Edge Networks: Convergence of Computing, Caching and Communications (2017, background): “Many literatures have studied the performance of caching at SBSs [84], [85], [86], [87], [88].”
FemtoCaching: Wireless Content Delivery Through Distributed Caching Helpers (2013, methodology): “This paper is motivated by a novel architecture that we have developed in the framework of a wide university-industry collaborative project [8], [9] and articulated in a number of papers covering various aspects of our proposal [10]–[15].”
Wireless caching: technical misconceptions and business barriers (2016, background): “Therefore, finding what contents to store at each cache is a difficult problem even if the popularities are assumed known [37].”
Fundamental Limits of Caching in Wireless D2D Networks (2014, background): “Users u ∈ U make arbitrary requests f u ∈ F = { 1 , . . . , m , from a ﬁxed ﬁle library of size m .”
A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective (2017, background): “tent requests are highly concentrated and some popular contents will be asynchronously and repeatedly requested. Motivated by this fact, wireless content caching or FemtoCaching was proposed in [126]–[128] to avoid frequent replication for the same contents by caching them at BSs. This technology ha”
Design of Contract-Based Trading Mechanism for a Small-Cell Caching System (2017, background): “Wireless caching generally consists of two stages: a data placement stage [16] and a data delivery stage [17].”
Base-Station Assisted Device-to-Device Communications for High-Throughput Wireless Video Networks (2013, background): “1An alternative, complementary, approach to dealing with the backhaul bottleneck was recently proposed by us in [6], [7], where femto-base stations are replaced by small base stations with high storage capacity but low backhaul capacity.”
Ultrareliable and Low-Latency Wireless Communication: Tail, Risk, and Scale (2018, background): “Other interesting works geared towards latency reduction at the network level include caching at the network edge (base stations and user equipment) [31]–[36], the use of shorter transmission time interval (TTI) [11], grant-free based nonorthogonal multiple access [8], [37] and mobile edge computing”
Learning-based optimization of cache content in a small cell base station (2014, background): “Reference [4] studies a caching problem in a backhaul-constrained small cell network, in which users can connect to several sBSs, and fetch ﬁles from the sBS that offers the least latency.”