When 5G meets ICN: An ICN-based caching approach for mobile video in 5G networks

Abstract

The dramatic increasing demand for video from mobile users (MU) has imposed huge pressure on cellular networks. By using the millimeter wave (mmWave) technique, the fifth generation (5G) networks can provide rich bandwidth to satisfy the requirements for high quality mobile video and alleviate the traffic pressure. However, the shorter transmission range of mmWave leads mobile users in 5G network suffer frequent handoffs and long connection delays which degrades the Quality of Experience (QoE) for mobile video users. How to improve QoE for mobile video users has become a crucial challenge.Information-centric-networking (ICN) is a promising paradigm to mitigate this challenge as its in-network caching can bring videos closer to users, which can reduce network traffic and video retrieval delay significantly. In this paper, we propose an ICN-based caching approach that considers both the mobility of users and the popularity of videos. While user mobility has rarely been considered in existing works, in this paper, user mobility is exploited to reduce the retrieval delay caused by frequent handoffs. Videos can be retrieved from the router which is directly connected to the base station (BS) instead of the original content provider when a handoff happens. Consequently, the retrieval delay caused by frequent handoffs can be significantly reduced. Simulations results show that our ICN-based approach outperforms the traditional IP-based RAN caching and the cooperation-driven ICN-based caching scheme (CDIC) in terms of retrieval delay and network traffic deduction.