A heuristic approach for overlay content-caching network design in 5G wireless networks

Abstract

With a wide variety of mobile applications and social networks, there is a growing demand for anytime, anywhere access to high quality video and other multimedia content. Fifth generation wireless networks are aiming to keep up with user demands by incorporating new spectrum bands at high frequencies, which results in shrinking of cell sizes and eventually leads to small cells. Dense deployment of small cells and base stations open up new opportunities for faster and energy-efficient access to content. Content caching at small cell base stations, for the purpose of reducing delay, has been studied in several previous works. In our previous work, we used Integer Linear Programming (ILP) models to show that content caching can also reduce energy consumption of User Equipment (UE). In particular, selecting a subset of small cell base stations to cache the content, reduces uplink energy budget, cuts down caching energy budget and simplifies management of distributed caches. Yet, ILP based methods are powerful for obtaining benchmark results but they are computationally intensive for large size problems. In this paper, we propose a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based scheme to deploy an overlay small cell content-caching network with the aim of reducing UE energy consumption. We show that PSO is computationally efficient while it slightly increases energy consumption with respect to the ILP-based methods. © 2016 IEEE.