An online approach for cooperative cache updating and forwarding in mobile edge network

Abstract

The proliferation of technological advancement in the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices accelerates the need for latency-sensitive multimedia applications. The network operator may charge application vendors to cache their content. Vendors risk losing their user base if users don’t receive the expected Quality of Service (QoS), which includes meeting specific delay thresholds for services like video on demand. While multiple content copies can enhance QoS by delivering content quickly, maintaining redundant copies is costly. Therefore, deploying edge servers at edge nodes and caching content is a prominent solution for application vendors. This approach guarantees lower latency, fewer content replicas, and reduced strain on backhaul links. However, the limited cache capabilities of individual edge nodes present challenges, such as efficiently allocating scarce resources to meet user demands. This work addresses the earlier challenges by formulating a cooperative content caching and forwarding problem by placing the various latency-sensitive content to minimize the total cost with resource and deadline constraints. The problem is formulated as an integer linear programming problem for cooperative caching in mobile edge networks to mitigate the total cost to the application vendors. In the absence of content popularity information, an online cooperative caching mechanism is presented to solve the dynamic content request and forwarding problem. Extensive simulations have been performed to illustrate that the proposed online algorithm significantly enhances the performance in terms of the total cost, load on the cloud, hit ratio, time utility, and cache utilization.