Towards a Distributed Caching Service at the WiFi Edge Using Wi-Cache

Abstract

Caching content close to the end users, e.g., at cellular base stations (BSs), WiFi access points (APs), and end user devices is known to improve efficiency and effectiveness of content delivery. This motivates the development of caching-as-a-service where edge networks and devices provide storage capacity to content providers, and enable them to strategically populate these caches to improve user experience in the targeted network. In this paper, we describe Wi-Cache, a prototype for providing caching-as-a-service at the WiFi edge. Wi-Cache is an SDN (Software Defined Networking) based distributed content caching system at the WiFi edge that uses storage at the APs for caching content. Wi-Cache caches content on wireless APs and delivers them to mobile clients when they are requested. It allows content providers to have fine-grained control over the AP-caches and also execute efficient content placement and delivery algorithms at the WiFi edge using a set of APIs that are provided by Wi-Cache. We also show the effectiveness of the Wi-Cache system using an extensive set of experiments.