Cache-Assisted Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Backhauling for 5G Cellular Networks

Fast growth of Internet content and availability of electronic devices such as smart phones and laptops has created an explosive content demand. As one of the 5G technology enablers, caching is a promising technique to off-load the network backhaul and reduce the content delivery delay. Satellite communications provides immense area coverage and high data rate, hence, it can be used for large-scale content placement in the caches. In this work, we propose using hybrid mono/multi-beam satellite-terrestrial backhaul network for off-line edge caching of cellular base stations in order to reduce the traffic of terrestrial network. The off-line caching approach is comprised of content placement and content delivery phases. The content placement phase is performed based on local and global content popularities assuming that the content popularity follows Zipf-like distribution. In addition, we propose an approach to generate local content popularities based on a reference Zipf-like distribution to keep the correlation of content popularity. Simulation results show that the hybrid satellite-terrestrial architecture considerably reduces the content placement time while sustaining the cache hit ratio quite close to the upper-bound compared to the satellite-only method

Integration of optical and satellite communication technologies to improve the cache filling time in future 5G edge networks

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Caching is an enabler to avoid congestion and delay in the backhaul links of future 5G networks. The basic idea behind this concept consists in estimating the content that would be most likely requested by the end users served by each edge node and, after that, make a pro-active placement of those files during the traffic off-peak hours. Optical wired/wireless terrestrial links support a high point-to-point data rate but, when the same content needs to reach different destinations, parallel unicast transmissions are needed. On the other hand, satellite systems provide a lower link-level data rate but can easily implement a multicast transmission due to their wide-area coverage. In this paper, a resource allocation strategy that determines the most convenient way to transport the different content using both terrestrial (optical) and satellite (radio) technologies is proposed. Simulation results show that the placement time can be notably reduced in a hybrid terrestrial-satellite backhaul network, particularly in case of bad weather that impacts the data rate of the wireless optical links. The effect of the file popularity distribution and the number of 5G edge nodes on the delivery time is also studied in detail.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Caching at the Edge with Fountain Codes

We address the use of linear randon fountain codes caching schemes in a heterogeneous satellite network. We consider a system composed of multiple hubs and a geostationary Earth orbit satellite. Coded content is memorized in hubs' caches in order to serve immediately the user requests and reduce the usage of the satellite backhaul link. We derive the analytical expression of the average backhaul rate, as well as a tight upper bound to it with a simple expression. Furthermore, we derive the optimal caching strategy which minimizes the average backhaul rate and compare the performance of the linear random fountain code scheme to that of a scheme using maximum distance separable codes. Our simulation results indicate that the performance obtained using fountain codes is similar to that of maximum distance separable codes