Joint Resource Allocation and Content Caching in Virtualized Multi-Cell Wireless Networks

Abstract

Content caching is an important fifth-generation (5G) technique, which aims to improve the user quality of service and relieve backhaul congestion, by placing popular contents at the network edge. Meanwhile, wireless network virtualization (WNV) provides a novel paradigm shift in 5G system design which enables to better utilize network resources, reduces the operation cost (OPEX), and allows rapid deployment of new services. Efficient deployment of the content caching technology in the virtualized wireless network environment, however, requires a suitable radio resource allocation framework to realize the great benefits of these technologies. In this paper, we study the joint resource allocation and content caching problem which aims to efficiently utilize the radio and content storage resources. This design problem targets at minimizing the maximum content request rejection rate experienced by users of different mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) in different cells, which results in a mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP).We solve this NP-hard problem by developing a bisection-search based algorithm that iteratively optimizes the resource allocation and content caching solution. Extensive numerical results confirm the efficacy of our proposed framework which significantly reduce the maximum rejection rate compared to other benchmark algorithms.