Caching Approach Research Articles

DeCa360: Deadline-aware edge caching for two-tier 360° video streaming

Two-tier 360° video streaming provides a robust solution for handling inaccurate viewport prediction and varying network conditions. Within this paradigm, the client employs a dual-buffer mechanism consisting of a long buffer for panoramic basic-quality segments and a short buffer for high-quality tiles. However, designing an efficient edge caching strategy for two-tier 360° videos is non-trivial. First, as basic-quality segments and high-quality tiles possess different delivery deadlines as well as content popularity, ignoring these discrepancies may result in inefficient edge caching. Second, accurately predicting the popularity of 360° videos at a fine granularity of video segments and tiles remains a challenge. To address these issues, we present DeCa360, a deadline-aware edge caching framework for 360° videos. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight runtime cache partitioning approach to achieve a careful balance between improving the cache hit ratio and guaranteeing more on-time delivery of objects. Moreover, we design a content popularity prediction method for two-tier 360° videos that combines a learning-based prediction model with domain knowledge of video streaming, leading to improved prediction accuracy and efficient cache replacement. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that DeCa360 outperforms all baseline algorithms in terms of byte-hit ratio and on-time delivery ratio, making it a promising approach for efficient edge caching of 360° videos.

Vehicular edge cloud computing content caching optimization solution based on content prediction and deep reinforcement learning

In conventional studies on vehicular edge computing, researchers frequently overlook the high-speed mobility of vehicles and the dynamic nature of the vehicular edge environment. Moreover, when employing deep reinforcement learning to address vehicular edge challenges, insufficient attention is given to the potential issue of the algorithm converging to a local optimal solution. This paper presents a content caching solution tailored for vehicular edge cloud computing, integrating content prediction and deep reinforcement learning techniques. Given the swift mobility of vehicles and the ever-changing nature of the vehicular edge environment, the study proposes a content prediction model based on Informer. Leveraging the Informer prediction model, the system anticipates the vehicular edge environment dynamics, thereby informing the caching of vehicle task content. Acknowledging the diverse time scales involved in policy decisions such as content updating, vehicle scheduling, and bandwidth allocation, the paper advocates a dual time-scale Markov modeling approach. Moreover, to address the local optimality issue inherent in the A3C algorithm, an enhanced A3C algorithm is introduced, incorporating an ɛ-greedy strategy to promote exploration. Recognizing the potential limitations posed by a fixed exploration rate ɛ, a dynamic baseline mechanism is proposed for updating ɛ dynamically. Experimental findings demonstrate that compared to alternative content caching approaches, the proposed vehicle edge computing content caching solution substantially mitigates content access costs. To support research in this area, we have publicly released the source code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/JYAyyyyyy/Informer.git.

Caching on the Sky: A Multiagent Federated Reinforcement Learning Approach for UAV-Assisted Edge Caching

Caching on the Sky: A Multiagent Federated Reinforcement Learning Approach for UAV-Assisted Edge Caching

A hybrid Bi-level management framework for caching and communication in Edge-AI enabled IoT

The proliferation of IoT devices has led to a surge in network traffic, resulting in higher energy usage and response delays. In-network caching has emerged as a viable solution to address this issue. However, caching IoT data faces two key challenges: the transient nature of IoT content and the unknown spatiotemporal content popularity. Additionally, the use of a global view on dynamic IoT networks is problematic due to the high communication overhead involved. To tackle these challenges, this paper presents an adaptive management approach that jointly optimizes caching and communication in IoT networks using a novel bi-level control method called BC3. The approach employs two types of controllers: a global ILP-based optimal controller for long-term timeslots and local learning-based controllers for short-term timeslots. The long-term controller periodically establishes a global cache policy for the network and sends specific cache rules to each edge server. The local controller at each edge server solves the joint problem of bandwidth allocation and cache adaptation using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique. The main objective is to minimize energy consumption and system response time with utilizing the global and local observations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach increases cache hit rate by approximately 12% and uses 11% less energy compared to the other methods. Increasing the cache hit rate can lead to a reduction in about 17% in response time for user requests. Our bi-level control approach offers a promising solution for leveraging the network's global visibility while balancing communication overhead (as energy consumption) against system performance. Additionally, the proposed method has the lowest cache eviction, around 19% lower than the lowest eviction of the other comparison methods. The eviction metric is a metric to evaluate the effectiveness of adaptive caching approach designed for transient data.

XRL-SHAP-Cache: an explainable reinforcement learning approach for intelligent edge service caching in content delivery networks

XRL-SHAP-Cache: an explainable reinforcement learning approach for intelligent edge service caching in content delivery networks

Reinforcement Learning Based Approaches to Adaptive Context Caching in Distributed Context Management Systems

Real-time applications increasingly rely on context information to provide relevant and dependable features. Context queries require large-scale retrieval, inferencing, aggregation, and delivery of context using only limited computing resources, especially in a distributed environment. If this is slow, inconsistent, and too expensive to access context information, the dependability and relevancy of real-time applications may fail to exist. This paper argues, transiency of context (i.e., the limited validity period), variations in the features of context query loads (e.g., the request rate, different Quality of Service (QoS), and Quality of Context (QoC) requirements), and lack of prior knowledge about context to make near real-time adaptations as fundamental challenges that need to be addressed to overcome these shortcomings. Hence, we propose a performance metric driven reinforcement learning based adaptive context caching approach aiming to maximize both cost- and performance-efficiency for middleware-based Context Management Systems (CMSs). Although context-aware caching has been thoroughly investigated in the literature, our approach is novel because existing techniques are not fully applicable to caching context due to (i) the underlying fundamental challenges and (ii) not addressing the limitations hindering dependability and consistency of context. Unlike previously tested modes of CMS operations and traditional data caching techniques, our approach can provide real-time pervasive applications with lower cost, faster, and fresher high quality context information. Compared to existing context-aware data caching algorithms, our technique is bespoken for caching context information, which is different from traditional data. We also show that our full-cycle context lifecycle-based approach can maximize both cost- and performance-efficiency while maintaining adequate QoC solely based on real-time performance metrics and our heuristic techniques without depending on any previous knowledge about the context, variations in query features, or quality demands, unlike any previous work. We demonstrate using a real world inspired scenario and a prototype middleware based CMS integrated with our adaptive context caching approach that we have implemented, how realtime applications that are 85% faster can be more relevant and dependable to users, while costing 60.22% less than using existing techniques to access context information. Our model is also at least twice as fast and more flexible to adapt compared to existing benchmarks even under uncertainty and lack of prior knowledge about context, transiency, and variable context query loads.

Application-Level Caching Approach Based on Enhanced Aging Factor and Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Relational database management systems (RDBMS) have long served as the fundamental infrastructure for web applications. Relatively slow access speeds characterize an RDBMS because its data is stored on a disk. This RDBMS weakness can be overcome using an in-memory database (IMDB). Each query result can be stored in the IMDB to accelerate future access. However, due to the limited capacity of the server cache in the IMDB, an appropriate data priority assessment mechanism needs to be developed. This paper presents a similar cache framework that considers four data vectors, namely the data size, timestamp, aging factor, and controller access statistics for each web page, which serve as the foundation elements for determining the replacement policy whenever there is a change in the content of the server cache. The proposed similarCache employs the Pearson correlation coefficient to quantify the similarity levels among the cached data in the server cache. The lowest Pearson correlation coefficients cached data are the first to be evicted from the memory. The proposed similarCache was empirically evaluated based on simulations conducted on four IRcache datasets. The simulation outcomes revealed that the data access patterns, and the configuration of the allocated memory cache significantly influenced the hit ratio performance. In particular, the simulations on the SV dataset with the most minor memory space configuration exhibited a 2.33% and 1% superiority over the SIZE and FIFO algorithms, respectively. Future tasks include building a cache that can adapt to data access patterns by determining the standard deviation. The proposed similarCache should raise the Pearson coefficient for often available data to the same level as most accessed data in exceptional cases.

Federated Learning-Based Service Caching in Multi-Access Edge Computing System

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) brings computations closer to mobile users, thereby decreasing service latency and providing location-aware services. Nevertheless, given the constrained resources of the MEC server, it is crucial to provide a limited number of services that properly fulfill the demands of users. Several static service caching approaches have been proposed. However, the effectiveness of these strategies is constrained by the dynamic nature of the system states and user demand patterns. To mitigate this problem, several investigations have been conducted on dynamic service caching techniques that can be categorized as centralized and distributed. However, centralized approaches typically require gathering comprehensive data from the entire system. This increases the burden on resources and raises concerns regarding data security and privacy. By contrast, distributed strategies require the formulation of complicated optimization problems without leveraging the inherent characteristics of the data. This paper proposes a distributed service caching strategy based on federated learning (SCFL) that works efficiently in a distributed system with user mobility. An autoencoder model is utilized to extract features regarding the service request distribution of individual MEC servers. The global model is then generated using federated learning, which is utilized to make service-caching decisions. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of other methods.

Computational scaling in inverse photonic design through factorization caching

Inverse design coupled with adjoint optimization is a powerful method to design on-chip nanophotonic devices with multi-wavelength and multi-mode optical functionalities. Although only two simulations are required in each iteration of this optimization process, these simulations still make up the vast majority of the necessary computations and render the design of complex devices with large footprints computationally infeasible. Here, we introduce a multi-faceted factorization caching approach to drastically simplify the underlying computations in finite-difference frequency-domain (FDFD) simulations and significantly reduce the time required for device optimization. Specifically, we cache the numerical and symbolic factorizations for the solution of the corresponding system of linear equations in discretized FDFD simulations and re-use them throughout the device design process. As proof-of-concept demonstrations of the resulting computational advantage, we present simulation speedups reaching as high as 9.2× in the design of broadband wavelength and mode multiplexers compared to conventional FDFD methods. We also show that factorization caching scales well over a broad range of footprints independent of the device geometry, from as small as 16μm2 to over 7000μm2. Our results present significant enhancements in the computational efficiency of inverse photonic design and can greatly accelerate the use of machine-optimized devices in future photonic systems.

Novel Edge Caching Approach Based on Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Internet of Vehicles

Along with the development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and wireless technology, the usage of applications that require low latency, such as autonomous driving and intelligent navigation, is increasing rapidly, and the demand for content is increasing greatly. This paper proposes an edge caching approach for the IoV based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (ECSMADRL) so as to resolve the problem of excessive response delay due to the large increase of data traffic in the IoV. The approach jointly considers content distribution and caching in dynamic environments. In other words, each moving vehicle in the IoV can be seen as an agent, and it can make decisions about content caching and content access adaptively according to the changing environment to minimize the delay in the process of content distribution. It is proved by experiments that compared with other methods, the proposed edge caching (EC) approach has better performance in reducing content distribution delay, improving content hit rate and success rate.

A Distributed Caching Approach for Minimizing Average Transmission Delay in Ultra-Dense Networks

Caching at the network edge is a promising approach to alleviate the backhaul congestion pressure and reduce transmission delay in ultra-dense networks (UDNs). However, the existing content caching methods do not fully explore and exploit potential caching and computation capabilities. In this paper, we propose a distributed caching approach as well as the corresponding content addressing method. Furthermore, a problem of caching optimization with the target to minimize the average transmission delay is investigated. We transform this nondifferentiable nonlinear programming problem into a linear programming problem. Then we utilize an Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm to solve this problem. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm can converge to the global optimum and our proposed distributed caching approach reduce the average transmission delay significantly. In popular caching strategy, the average transmission delay in our proposed method decreases over 30% and 50% when compared with caching maximum distance separable (MDS) packets and caching entire files, respectively.

Fine-grained Caching and Resource Scheduling for Adaptive Bitrate Videos in Edge Networks

With the easy access to mobile networks and the proliferation of video applications, video traffic is occupying a great portion of the network traffic, which poses a new challenge of how to alleviate the heavy backhaul traffic and ensure the high quality of experience for video services. As a promising solution towards addressing this challenge, video caching in edge networks has recently received significant attention, which mostly considers the video popularity and the user preference for the video. However, few studies consider the user behavior and the user preference for different parts of the video that indeed have an essential impact on caching efficiency. Hence, this article proposes a new caching and resource scheduling scheme for adaptive bitrate videos by incorporating these fine-grained factors. We first model the video service problem as a nonlinear integer programming problem, which can be divided into a cache placement problem and an online resource scheduling problem. Then, we design efficient algorithms based on several techniques, including greedy strategy, relaxation, and rounding, to solve the two problems. Extensive experimental results based on two real-world datasets show that the proposed solution achieves superior performance compared with several state-of-the-art caching approaches.

A systematic survey on content caching in ICN and ICN-IoT: Challenges, approaches and strategies

Context:Data traffic increased in recent years due to the expansion of IoT (Internet of Things) applications, and most IoT applications follow a content-oriented paradigm. The host-to-host nature of the existing internet architecture makes it inefficient for handling content distribution and information sharing. ICN (Information Centric Network) is a content-centric network that offers guaranteed solutions for data transfer between consumers and producers. ICN caching enables the caching technique in available resources, which can enhance the overall network performance by enabling users to access data within the network. Objective:This study aims to review the literature on caching approaches and strategies in ICN-IoT to identify areas that need more attention in current and future research directions. Method:A systematic mapping study was conducted to identify the relevant literature, and 88 publications that are categorized as caching approaches and caching strategies were chosen as the most relevant studies. Result:Based on caching approaches and caching strategies, the articles are grouped. Edge caching (50%), in-network caching (25%), and hybrid caching (25%) represent the majority of the articles on caching approaches. Popularity-based caching (26%), cooperative caching (17%), collaborative caching (17%), machine learning-based caching (19%), and probabilistic caching (7%) represent the majority of the articles in caching strategies. This study further presents the simulators, performance metrics, parameters and performance evaluation of the existing literature. Conclusion:The results confirm that ICN is a futuristic internet architecture that assigns a content name to each content in the network and enables in-network caching; it is a superior technique for resolving IoT challenges and increases the overall network efficiency.

An efficient edge caching approach for SDN-based IoT environments utilizing the moth flame clustering algorithm

An efficient edge caching approach for SDN-based IoT environments utilizing the moth flame clustering algorithm

Heterogeneous Edge Caching Based on Actor-Critic Learning With Attention Mechanism Aiding

In recent years, the explosive growth of network traffic has placed significant strain on backbone networks. To alleviate the content access delay and reduce additional network resource consumption resulting from large-scale requests, edge caching has emerged as a promising technology. Despite capturing substantial attention from both academia and industry, most existing studies overlook the heterogeneity of the environment and the spatial-temporal characteristics of content popularity. As a result, the potential for edge caching remains largely unexploited. To address these challenges, we propose a neighborhood-aware caching (NAC) framework in this paper. The framework leverages the perimeter information from neighboring base stations (BSs) to model the edge caching problem in heterogeneous scenarios as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). To fully exploit the environmental information, we introduce an improved actor-critic method that integrates an attention mechanism into the neural network. The actor-network in our framework is responsible for making caching decisions based on local information, while the critic network evaluates and enhances the actor's performance. The multi-head attention layer in the critic network enables integration of environmental features into the model, reducing the limitations associated with local investigation. To facilitate comparison from an engineering perspective, we also propose a heuristic algorithm, Neighbor-Influence-Least-Frequently-Use (NILFU). Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed NAC framework outperforms other baseline methods in terms of average delay, hit rate, and traffic offload ratio in heterogeneous scenarios. This highlights the effectiveness of the neighborhood-aware caching approach in enhancing the performance of edge caching systems in such scenarios.

Caching-Enabled Computation Offloading in Multi-Region MEC Network via Deep Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid development of the Internet, more and more computing-intensive applications with high requirements on computing delay and energy consumption have emerged. Recently, the use of mobile-edge computing servers for auxiliary computing is considered as an effective way to reduce latency and energy consumption. In addition, applications such as autonomous driving will generate a large number of repetitive tasks. Using a cache to store the computational results of popular tasks can avoid the overhead caused by repetitive processing. In this article, we study the problem of computation offloading for users in multiple regions. The optimization goal is expressed as choosing offloading strategies and caching strategies to minimize the total delay and energy consumption of all regions. We first use the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) framework to solve the problem of computational offloading in a single region. We also show the inefficiency of existing collaborative caching approaches in multiple regions, and propose a new collaborative caching algorithm (CCA) to improve the overall cache hit rate of the system. Finally, we integrate the DDPG and CCA algorithms to form a holistic efficient caching and offloading strategy for all regions. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the cache hit rate, and has an excellent performance in reducing the total system overhead.

Mobility-Aware Data Caching to Improve D2D Communications in Heterogeneous Networks

User Equipment (UE) is equipped with limited cache resources that can be utilized to offload data traffic through device-to-device (D2D) communications. Data caching at a UE level has the potential to significantly alleviate data traffic burden from the backhaul link. Moreover, in wireless networks, users exhibit mobility that poses serious challenges to successful data transmission via D2D communications due to intermittent connectivity among users. Users’ mobility can be exploited to efficiently cache contents by observing connectivity patterns among users. Therefore, it is crucial to develop an efficient data caching mechanism for UE while taking into account users’ mobility patterns. In this work, we propose a mobility-aware data caching approach to enhance data offloading via D2D communication. First, we model users’ connectivity patterns. Then, contents are cached in UE’ cache resources based on users’ data preferences. In addition, we also take into account signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) requirements of the users. Hence, our proposed caching mechanism exploits connectivity patterns of users to perform data placement based on users’ own demands and neighboring users to enhance data offloading via cache resources. We performed extensive simulations to investigate the performance of our proposed mobility-aware data caching mechanism. The performance of our proposed caching mechanism is compared to most deployed data caching mechanisms, while taking into account the dynamic nature of the wireless channel and the interference experienced by the users. From the obtained results, it is evident that our proposed approach achieves 14%, 16%, and 11% higher data offloading gain than the least frequently used, the Zipf-based probabilistic, and the random caching schemes in case of an increasing number of users, cache capacity, and number of contents, respectively. Moreover, we also analyzed cache hit rates, and our proposed scheme achieves 8% and 5% higher cache hit rate than the least frequently used, the Zipf-based probabilistic, and the random caching schemes in case of an increasing number of contents and cache capacity, respectively. Hence, our proposed caching mechanism brings significant improvement in data sharing via D2D communications.

A caching mechanism to exploit object store speed in High Energy Physics analysis

Data analysis workflows in High Energy Physics (HEP) read data written in the ROOT columnar format. Such data has traditionally been stored in files that are often read via the network from remote storage facilities, which represents a performance penalty especially for data processing workflows that are I/O bound. To address that issue, this paper presents a new caching mechanism, implemented in the I/O subsystem of ROOT, which is independent of the storage backend used to write the dataset. Notably, it can be used to leverage the speed of high-bandwidth, low-latency object stores. The performance of this caching approach is evaluated by running a real physics analysis on an Intel DAOS cluster, both on a single node and distributed on multiple nodes.

Energy-efficient proactive caching with multipath routing

The ever-continuing explosive growth of on-demand content distribution has imposed great pressure on mobile/wireless network infrastructures. To ease congestion in the network and to increase perceived user experience, caching of popular content closer to the end-users can play a significant role and as such this issue has received significant attention over the last few years. Additionally, energy saving is treated as a fundamental requirement in the design of next-generation mobile networks. However, there has been little attention to the overlapping area between energy saving and network caching especially when considering multipath routing. To this end, this paper proposes an energy-efficient caching with multipath routing support. The proposed scheme provides a joint anchoring of popular content into a set of potential caching nodes with optimized multipath support whilst ensuring a balance between transmission and caching energy cost. The proposed model also considers different content delivery modes, such as multicast and unicast . Two separated Integer-Linear Programming (ILP) models are formulated for each delivery mode. To tackle the curse of dimensionality we then provide a greedy simulated annealing algorithm , which not only reduces the time complexity but also provides a competitive performance. A wide set of numerical investigations reveal that the proposed scheme reduces the energy consumption up to 75% compared with other widely used caching approaches under the premise of network resource limitation. Sensitivity analysis to different parameters is also meticulously discussed in this paper.

Edge Caching Enhancement for Industrial Internet: A Recommendation-Aided Approach

Edge caching enables low-delay and high-quality data services for the Industrial Internet. However, traditional popularity-based edge caching ignores the diversity and evolution of user interest, especially among user groups, and therefore has the limited quality of experience guarantees for users. In this regard, a recommendation-aided edge caching approach is proposed to leverage the time-varying user interest. Specifically, a dynamic interest capture model was proposed to mine the individual user interest, based on which, a group interest aggregation algorithm is then studied to determine the content caching strategies for edge nodes. Thereafter, an edge content recommendation is further proposed to optimize the cache hit ratio while ensuring a satisfying recommendation hit ratio based on the personalized user interest and given caching decision. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is finally validated by comparing it with other baseline approaches.