A Macro-Assisted Cooperative Edge Caching in Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

Abstract

Caching at mobile edge network is considered as a promising solution, which can not only reduce the network traffic, but also alleviate the backhaul load and improve the quality of service. But most existing caching schemes do not well solve the problem of small cache size and the difficulty to predict content popularity in mobile edge network. In this paper, we propose a macro-assisted cooperative edge caching (MACEC) scheme, which contains a macro base station (MBS) and multiple small base stations (SBSs) within the coverage of the MBS. In addition, we also propose an URL Prefix Weight (URL-PW) Based caching strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the distributed edge caching (DEC) scheme using the LRU strategy, the MACEC scheme using the URL-PW strategy can effectively improve the cache hit rate at least by 30%.