Content Distribution for 5G Systems Based on Distributed Cloud Service Network Architecture

Abstract

Future mobile communications face enormous challenges as traditional voice services are replaced with increasing mobile multimedia and data services. To address the vast data traffic volume and the requirement of user Quality of Experience (QoE) in the next generation mobile networks, it is imperative to develop efficient content distribution technique, aiming at significantly reducing redundant data transmissions and improving content delivery performance. On the other hand, in recent years cloud computing as a promising new content-centric paradigm is exploited to fulfil the multimedia requirements by provisioning data and computing resources on demand. In this paper, we propose a cooperative caching framework which implements State based Content Distribution (SCD) algorithm for future mobile networks. In our proposed framework, cloud service providers deploy a plurality of cloudlets in the network forming a Distributed Cloud Service Network (DCSN), and pre-allocate content services in local cloudlets to avoid redundant content transmissions. We use content popularity and content state which is determined by content requests, editorial updates and new arrivals to formulate a content distribution optimization model. Data contents are deployed in local cloudlets according to the optimal solution to achieve the lowest average content delivery latency. We use simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Numerical results show that the proposed framework can significantly improve content cache hit rate, reduce content delivery latency and outbound traffic volume in comparison with known existing caching strategies.