A game theoretical distributed approach for opportunistic caching strategy

Abstract

Wireless network virtualization (WNV) has been a hot topic recently, which can provide the customized service to construct virtual networks for various requirements quickly and flexibly by resource sharing. However, most of the traffic is generated by duplicate downloads for a few popular contents. Meanwhile, due to the isolation in the existing WNV, these popular contents cannot be shared among various requests, and thus the congestion and overhead would be caused in the remote data center. Therefore, in order to decline the congestion and overhead from the remote data center, the caching problem is addressed in this paper, which aims to overhear and cache content opportunistically to provide the quicker response for the future requests by in-network nodes. To well understand the impact of content caching, we formulate this issue as a Markov chain, and analyze the content response ratio according to the steady-state mathematically. Furthermore, we define the content caching strategy decision as an optimization problem, and use potential game to decide caching strategy based on Nash Equilibrium in a distributed manner, denoted as Game based Opportunistic Caching Strategy (GOCS). The experimental results show the effectiveness of GOCS in terms of average response hops, average cache hit ratio, data center load reduction ratio, and average resource consumption.