Optimal Cache Allocation Research Articles

Joint Optimization of Transmit Beamforming and Base Station Cache Allocation in Multi-Cell C-RAN

This paper studies a downlink cloud radio access network (C-RAN) consisting of a centralized processor (CP) and multiple cells each one of which has one cache-enabled base station (BS) connected to the CP through wireless backhaul links. In such a network, we aim to determine sizes of the cache allocated to the BSs such that the long-term delivery time of the available files is minimized. Considering the two-stage nature of this problem, we formulate a beamforming optimization problem and a cache allocation problem. The purpose of the first one is to deliver un-cached portions of files to the BSs in the shortest possible time during the beamforming stage. The second problem aims to minimize long-term expectation of delivery time through optimal cache allocation during the cache allocation stage. We rigorously prove that the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">time-varying beamformers</i> can be assumed to be piece-wise constant functions of time. Based on this finding, the beamforming optimization problem does not appear to be amenable to a computationally efficient solution. Hence, we resort to the zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming approach to tackle the beamforming optimization problem. Using the results of the beamforming optimization problem, we prove that the cache allocation problem is a convex optimization problem; hence it can be solved by any convex optimization solvers. Simulation results show that the loss of optimality due to adopting ZF beamforming is negligible. Moreover, the superiority of our proposed cache allocation scheme over several other heuristic schemes including proportional cache size allocation is shown.

Scaling Performance Analysis and Optimization Based on the Node Spatial Distribution in Mobile Content‐Centric Networks

Content‐centric networks (CCNs) have become a promising technology for relieving the increasing wireless traffic demands. In this paper, we explore the scaling performance of mobile content‐centric networks based on the nonuniform spatial distribution of nodes, where each node moves around its own home point and requests the desired content according to a Zipf distribution. We assume each mobile node is equipped with a finite local cache, which is applied to cache contents following a static cache allocation scheme. According to the nonuniform spatial distribution of cache‐enabled nodes, we introduce two kinds of clustered models, i.e., the clustered grid model and the clustered random model. In each clustered model, we analyze throughput and delay performance when the number of nodes goes infinity by means of the proposed cell‐partition scheduling scheme and the distributed multihop routing scheme. We show that the node mobility degree and the clustering behavior play the fundamental roles in the aforementioned asymptotic performance. Finally, we study the optimal cache allocation problem in the two kinds of clustered models. Our findings provide a guidance for developing the optimal caching scheme. We further perform the numerical simulations to validate the theoretical scaling laws.

Audience-Retention-Rate-Aware Caching and Coded Video Delivery With Asynchronous Demands

Most results on coded caching focus on a static scenario, in which a fixed number of users synchronously place their requests from a content library, and the performance is measured in terms of the latency in satisfying all of these demands. In practice, however, users start watching an online video content asynchronously over time, and often abort watching a video before it is completed. The latter behaviour is captured by the notion of audience retention rate, which measures the portion of a video content watched on average. In order to bring coded caching one step closer to practice, asynchronous user demands are considered in this paper, by allowing user demands to arrive randomly over time, and both the popularity of video files, and the audience retention rates are taken into account. A decentralized partial coded caching (PCC) scheme is proposed, together with two cache allocation schemes; namely the optimal cache allocation (OCA) and the popularity-based cache allocation (PCA), which allocate users' caches among different chunks of the video files in the library. Numerical results validate that the proposed PCC scheme, either with OCA or PCA, outperforms conventional uncoded caching as well as the state-of-the-art decentralized caching schemes, which consider only the file popularities, and are designed for synchronous demand arrivals. An information-theoretical lower bound on the average delivery rate is also presented.

Design and Evaluation of the Optimal Cache Allocation for Content-Centric Networking

Content-centric networking (CCN) is a promising framework to rebuild the Internet's forwarding substrate around the concept of content. CCN advocates ubiquitous in-network caching to enhance content delivery, and thus each router has storage space to cache frequently requested content. In this work, we focus on the cache allocation problem, namely, how to distribute the cache capacity across routers under a constrained total storage budget for the network. We first formulate this problem as a content placement problem and obtain the optimal solution by a two-step method. We then propose a suboptimal heuristic method based on node centrality, which is more practical in dynamic networks with frequent content publishing. We investigate through simulations the factors that affect the optimal cache allocation, and perhaps more importantly we use a real-life Internet topology and video access logs from a large scale Internet video provider to evaluate the performance of various cache allocation methods. We observe that network topology and content popularity are two important factors that affect where exactly should cache capacity be placed. Further, the heuristic method comes with only a very limited performance penalty compared to the optimal allocation. Finally, using our findings, we provide recommendations for network operators on the best deployment of CCN caches capacity over routers.

Workload-Aware Resource Sharing and Cache Management for Scalable Video Streaming

The required real-time and high-rate transfers for multimedia data severely limit the number of video streams that can be delivered concurrently. Resource-sharing techniques address this problem and can be classified into two main classes: stream merging and periodic broadcasting. We evaluate through extensive simulation major resource-sharing techniques from the two classes, considering different service models and video workloads. We utilize this extensive analysis in developing a workload-aware hybrid solution (WAHS) that combines the advantages of the best performers among resource-sharing techniques. Moreover, we propose a statistical cache management (SCM) approach and derive analytical models for optimal cache allocation to reduce further the demands on the disk I/O when various resource sharing techniques are used.