An Efficient Video Content Delivery Strategy for Radio Access Network Environments

Abstract

When a radio access network (RAN) environment cannot handle the tremendous mobile data traffic, users may experience degraded or declined services. To help process the large number of user video requests in RANs, a content delivery network (CDN) architecture has been recently introduced, which establishes a number of cache servers outside the source server for users to get the needed data from the nearest cache server. To upgrade the performance of a wireless CDN, this paper presents a new caching strategy based on analytical results of real user video request traces and specific caching considerations for videos with different popularity degrees. The new strategy first caches videos with high popularity to all helpers and then caches those with low popularity to the remaining helper storage to enhance the overall request hits. Performance evaluation exhibits that, when compared with other caching strategies, our new strategy is able to yield better request hits with low complexity and average delay time.