Mobility-aware proactive video caching based on asynchronous federated learning in mobile edge computing systems

Abstract

With the rapid advance of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the surging user-centric smart devices, video services such as short videos, real-time video streaming, and Virtual Reality (VR) gaming are emerging. Traditional cloud-centric caching is no longer able to satisfy the low-latency needs of mobile user groups. Predicting the most popular content in advance and caching it on edge devices such as small base stations (SBS) is a promising solution to alleviate network congestion and supply better Quality of Service (QoS) for mobile users. However, frequently changing popular content, limited edge caching resources, privacy of user data, and user mobility pose significant challenges to edge video caching. To tackle these challenges, we propose an efficient asynchronous federated learning (AFL)-based mobility-aware proactive video caching scheme (AF-MPVC), which significantly improves the overall network performance while preventing the risk of user data leakage. First, we model the proactive video caching problem in mobile edge computing systems and consider the impact of user mobility on AFL, representing the problem as an autoencoder (AE) model loss minimization problem. Then, a proactive video caching algorithm is proposed based on a filtering model, which uses the hidden features obtained from the trained AE model to compute the user similarity to find the popular videos that are most likely to be accessed by users and combine them with the most frequently requested videos. Meanwhile, we take into account the short duration of high mobility users staying on the current SBS and cache some videos to neighboring edge servers to have more redundant space to store more less popular videos. Finally, experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the presented caching scheme outperforms other baseline caching schemes with respect to cache hit rate and latency reduction.