Analysis and Optimization of Cache-Enabled Fog Radio Access Networks: Successful Transmission Probability, Fractional Offloaded Traffic and Delay

Abstract

In this paper, the edge caching optimization problem in fog radio access networks (F-RANs) is investigated. Considering that fog access points (F-APs) can offer cooperation gain by jointly transmitting the same file or content diversity gain by concurrently transmitting the coded subfiles, we propose to use both joint transmission (JT) strategy and parallel transmission (PT) strategy to serve users. Using tools from stochastic geometry, we first derive the expressions of successful transmission probability (STP) under different transmission strategies, and then derive the expressions of fractional offloaded traffic (FOT) and delay. We further formulate the corresponding edge caching optimization problem to maximize the STP, FOT or minimize the delay. Considering the NP-hard property of the above optimization problem, we propose an improved fruit fly optimization (FFO) based edge caching scheme, which utilizes the dynamic search step to avoid pre-mature convergence. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the convergence and global optimality of our proposed scheme. Numerical results show that a significant performance gain is achieved by using our proposed edge caching scheme compared with the baseline schemes.