Proactive Cache System Using Cellular-Radio Information on MEC

Abstract

To achieve a quick response to mobile terminals and utilize the large volumes of data in mobile network, it is proposed to use resources of edges of mobile network as known as Multi-Access Edge Cloud (MEC) and integrate MEC with clouds. A proactive cache technology, which allocates cache data to MEC servers accessed by mobile terminals in advance, is one of technologies to provide the data in a low latency for the mobile terminals. The technology, however, less considers both of the cache placement in time for handover (HO) of mobile terminals and the increase in the traffic between MEC servers for cache distribution. The increase in the traffic is caused by duplicated routes of cache transfer from a location of content data to cache locations and by cache placements on more MEC servers to improve cache hit rate according to a mobile terminal transition. In this paper, we propose a novel proactive cache system which transfers cache data in time for HO of mobile terminals and reduces the traffic between MEC servers, using a route de-duplicating technique for cache transfer and selective data delivery utilizing the locations of mobile terminals predicted from cellular-radio information. We also propose the system architecture which enables services to utilize cellular-radio information by APIs, and evaluate the system by a simulation of the HO prediction and the estimation of the traffic between MEC servers for transferring caches. Numerical results indicate 49.1% reduction of the total traffic between MEC servers and reveal characteristics and problems of the cache system using cellular-radio information.