Competitive Caching of Contents in 5G Edge Cloud Networks

Speaker : Francesco De Pellegrini
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Date: 28/06/2017
Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Location: LINCS Seminars room

Abstract

The surge of mobile data traffic forces network operators to cope with capacity shortage. The deployment of small cells in 5G networks is meant to increase radio access capacity. Mobile edge computing technologies, in turn, can be used in order to manage dedicated cache space memory inside the radio access network, thus reducing latency and backhaul traffic. Mobile network operators will be able to provision content providers with new caching services to enhance the quality of experience of their customers on the move. Cache memory in the mobile edge network will become a shared resource.We study a competitive caching scheme where contents are stored at given price set by the mobile network operator. We first formulate a resource allocation problem for a tagged content provider seeking to minimize the expected missed cache rate. The optimal caching policy is derived accounting for popularity and availability of contents, the spatial distribution of small cells, and the caching strategies of competing content providers. It is showed to induce a specific order on contents to be cached based on their popularity and availability.Next, we study a game among content providers in the form of a generalized Kelly mechanism with bounded strategy sets and heterogeneous players. Existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium are proved. Numerical results validate and characterize the performance of the system and the convergence to the Nash equilibrium.