Dynamic cache rental and content caching in elastic wireless CDNs

Abstract

With elastic CDNs, content providers can rent cache space on demand at different cloud locations in order to enhance their offered quality of service (QoS). This paper addresses a key challenge in this context, namely how to invest an available budget in cache space in order to match spatio-temporal fluctuations of file demand and storage price. Specifically, we consider jointly dynamic cache rental, file placement, and request-cache association in a wireless scenario in order to provide a just-in-time CDN service. The objective is to maximize the benefit in average download delay obtained by the rented caches, while ensuring that the time-average rental cost is less than a fixed budget. We leverage a Lyapunov drift-minus-benefit technique to transform our infinite horizon problem into day-by-day subproblems which can be solved without knowledge of distant future file popularity and transmission rates. For the case of non-overlapping small cells (also wired case) we provide an efficient subproblem solution, referred to as JCC. However, in the general overlapping case, the subproblem becomes a mixed integer non-linear program (MINLP). In this case, we employ a dual decomposition method to derive a scalable solution, namely the JCCA algorithm. Finally, via extensive simulations, we reveal that the proposed JCCA algorithm attains 82.66 % higher delay benefit than existing static cache storage-based algorithms when available average cache budget is 20% of entire file library; moreover, the benefit becomes higher as the average cache budget gets tighter.