A collaborative caching over PLC for remote areas

Abstract

Power line communication (PLC) technology has emerged to foster ease of reach for broadband access network in remote or developing areas at lower costs by making use of existing wired power infrastructure for electricity distribution. The increase in data demand, pushed by the popularity of communication services, poses an overwhelming burden on the underlying PLC technology, especially for backhaul links. To confront this issue, edge server deployed at the access network improves data processing and reduces network delays and also helps better provisioning of resources which are crucial for PLC networks. Moreover, data caching at specialized nodes such as edge servers brings forth efficient retrieving, storing and processing of data. In this work, we propose a distributed data caching scenario jointly based on edge server (ES) and edge devices (EDs) that are equipped with caching facility and are communicating via PLC in a remote area. We develop a framework to test the mutual collaboration between ES and EDs for content fetching to minimize the use of cloud resources and relieve the load on possibly congested PLC backhaul links. Results reveal that a collaborative caching would boost effective utilization of low bandwidth PLC links and the shift of most popular contents at user premises is crucial to improve socio-economic growth and digital learning platforms for unconnected part of the world.