Joint Radio Resource Allocation and Content Caching in Heterogeneous Virtualized Wireless Networks

Abstract

An efficient content caching policy at the edge of the mobile cellular network can improve the quality of services of the mobile users and reduces network congestion at the backhaul. On the other hand, the wireless network virtualization emerges as a cutting-edge technique to address the limited network capacity problem due to the exponential growth of the mobile data traffic. In addition, the wireless network virtualization can bring huge benefits such as reducing the capital expenditure (CAPEX) and the operational expenditure (OPEX) as well as improving the network capacity. In this regard, one of the key requirements to recognize the benefits of the above mentioned two technologies is to have an applicable resource allocation framework, that enables the deployment of the content caching schemes in the virtualized wireless network. In this study, we investigate a novel joint radio resource allocation and content caching problem to efficiently utilize the radio resource blocks, the transmit power, and the available cache storage at the base stations (BSs). The goal of the formulated problem presented in this paper focuses on minimizing the delays experienced by the end mobile users of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). We show that the formulated problem is a non-convex, mixed integer non-linear problem (MINLP), which is NP-hard and simply intractable. Therefore, we deploy the block upper-bound minimization (BSUM) algorithm to solve the formulated problem. Numerical results show that our method outperforms the existing baseline resource allocation schemes, with up to 19% performance gain in terms of network delay.