5G Network Simulator for Network Caching

Abstract

This paper proposes a simulator for network caching research in a hierarchical 5G network. The proposed simulator adopts a modular structure to simply and quickly test new caching policies, and also includes well-known methods such as Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE) and Leave Copy Down (LCD) for performance comparison. The functions of combining existing caching policies and adjusting the number of components enable researchers to easily test their own caching policies. Additionally, the simulator provides the module to test a caching policy based on the Deep Q-Network (DQN). Recently, mobile edge caching (MEC), which stores frequently accessed content at the edge of the network, has been proposed to reduce the backhaul traffic. The proposed simulator also offers a way for evaluating MEC performance in hierarchical 5G wireless networks.