Energy-Efficient Joint Content Caching and Small Base Station Activation Mechanism Design in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Heterogeneous cellular networks(HCNs), by introducing caching capability, has been considered as a promising technique in 5 G era, which can bring contents closer to users to reduce the transmission delay, save scarce bandwidth resource. Although many works have been done for caching in HCNs, from an energy perspective, there still exists much space to develop a more energy-efficient system when considering the fact that the majority of base stations are under-utilized in the most of the time. Therefore, in this paper, by taking the activation mechanism for the base stations into account, we study a joint caching and activation mechanism design to further improve the energy efficiency, then we formulate the optimization problem as an Integer Linear Programming problem(ILP) to maximize the system energy saving. Due to the enormous computation complexity for finding the optimal solution, we introduced a Quantum-inspired Evolutionary Algorithm(QEA) to iteratively provide the global best solution. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm presents an excellent performance, which is far better than the strategy of only considering caching without deactivation mechanism in the actual, normal situation. We also provide performance comparison amongour QEA, random sleeping algorithm and greedy algorithm, numerical results illustrate our introduced QEA performs best in accuracy and global optimality.

What to Cache：Differentiated Caching Resource Allocation and Management in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking(ICN) aims to improve the efficiency of content delivery and reduce the redundancy of data transmission by caching contents in network nodes. An important issue is to design caching methods with better cache hit rate and achieve allocating on-demand. Therefore, an in-network caching scheduling scheme for ICN was designed, distinguishing different kinds of contents and dynamically allocating the cache size on-demand. First discussing what was appropriated to be cached in nodes, and then a classification about the contents could be cached was proposed. Furthermore, we used AHP to weight different contents classes through analyzing users' behavior. And a distributed control process was built, to achieve differentiated caching resource allocation and management. The designed scheme not only avoids the waste of caching resource, but also further enhances the cache availability. Finally, the simulation results are illustrated to show that our method has the superior performance in the aspects of server hit rate and convergence.

Energy-Efficient Joint Caching and Transcoding for HTTP Adaptive Streaming in 5G Networks with Mobile Edge Computing

With the new promising technique of mobile edge computing (MEC) emerging, by utilizing the edge computing and cloud computing capabilities to realize the HTTP adaptive video streaming transmission in MEC-based 5G networks has been widely studied. Although many works have been done, most of the existing works focus on the issues of network resource utilization or the quality of experience (QoE) promotion, while the energy efficiency is largely ignored. In this paper, different from previous works, in order to realize the energy efficiency for video transmission in MEC-enhanced 5G networks, we propose a joint caching and transcoding schedule strategy for HTTP adaptive video streaming transmission by taking the caching and transcoding into consideration. We formulate the problem of energy-efficient joint caching and transcoding as an integer programming problem to minimize the system energy consumption. Due to solving the optimization problem brings huge computation complexity, therefore, to make the optimization problem tractable, a heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to iteratively reach the global optimum solution with a lower complexity and higher accuracy. Finally, numerical simulation results are illustrated to demonstrated that our proposed scheme brings an excellent performance.

A Game Theoretic Approach for Hierarchical Caching Resource Sharing in 5G Networks with Virtualization

Caching and virtualization have been considered as the promising techniques in 5G Networks. In 5G networks with virtualization, the caching resources deployed by infrastructure providers (InPs) can be abstracted into isolated slices and transparently shared by mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). In this case, one of the most important issues is how the MVNOs to share the caching resource. To solve this issue, different from previous works, a hierarchical caching architecture that core network and radio access network (RAN) have the caching capability in 5G networks with virtualization is first considered in this paper. Then, we study the problem of hierarchical caching resource sharing for MVNOs, and a competitive game to maximize their expectation revenue based on the oligopoly market model is formulated. As it is a hard problem to find the optimal solution in the hierarchical caching resource sharing problem, we decompose the optimization problem into two independent caching resource sharing problems in RAN and core network, respectively. Then the local optimal solutions are solved and the global Nash equilibrium solution is achieved. Finally, simulation results are illustrated to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.

Intelligent Resources Management System Design in Information Centric Networking

Information centric networking(ICN) is a new network architecture that is centred on accessing content. It aims to solve some of the problems associated with IP networks, increasing content distribution capability and improving users' experience. To analyse the requests' patterns and fully utilize the universal cached contents, a novel intelligent resources management system is proposed, which enables effi cient cache resource allocation in real time, based on changing user demand patterns. The system is composed of two parts. The fi rst part is a fi ne-grain traffi c estimation algorithm called Temporal Poisson traffi c prediction(TP2) that aims at analysing the traffi c pattern(or aggregated user requests' demands) for different contents. The second part is a collaborative cache placement algorithm that is based on traffic estimated by TP2. The experimental results show that TP2 has better performance than other comparable traffi c prediction algorithms and the proposed intelligent system can increase the utilization of cache resources and improve the network capacity.