The three primary colors of mobile systems

In this paper, we present the notion of "mobile 3C systems in which the "Communications", "Computing", and "Caching" (i.e., 3C) make up the three primary resources/funcationalties, akin to the three primary colors, for a mobile system. We argue that in future mobile networks, the roles of computing and caching are as intrinsic and essential as communications, and only the collective usage of these three primary resources can support the sustainable growth of mobile systems. By defining the 3C resources in their canonical forms, we reveal the important fact that "caching" affects the mobile system performance by introducing non-causality into the system, whereas "computing" achieves capacity gains by performing logical operations across mobile system entities. Many existing capacity-enhancing techniques such as coded multicast, collaborative transmissions, and proactive content pushing can be cast into the native 3C framework for analytical tractability. We further illustrate the mobile 3C concepts with practical examples, including a system on broadcast-unicast convergence for massive media content delivery. The mobile 3C design paradigm opens up new possibilities as well as key research problems bearing academic and practice significance.Comment: submitted to IEEE Communications Magazine -- Feature Topic: Mobile 3C Network

Optimal Task Scheduling in Communication-Constrained Mobile Edge Computing Systems for Wireless Virtual Reality

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is expected to be an effective solution to deliver 360-degree virtual reality (VR) videos over wireless networks. In contrast to previous computation-constrained MEC framework, which reduces the computation-resource consumption at the mobile VR device by increasing the communication-resource consumption, we develop a communications-constrained MEC framework to reduce communication-resource consumption by increasing the computation-resource consumption and exploiting the caching resources at the mobile VR device in this paper. Specifically, according to the task modularization, the MEC server can only deliver the components which have not been stored in the VR device, and then the VR device uses the received components and the corresponding cached components to construct the task, resulting in low communication-resource consumption but high delay. The MEC server can also compute the task by itself to reduce the delay, however, it consumes more communication-resource due to the delivery of entire task. Therefore, we then propose a task scheduling strategy to decide which computation model should the MEC server operates, in order to minimize the communication-resource consumption under the delay constraint. Finally, we discuss the tradeoffs between communications, computing, and caching in the proposed system.Comment: submitted to APCC 201

Artificial Interference Aided Physical Layer Security in Cache-enabled Heterogeneous Networks

Caching popular contents is a promising way to offload the mobile data traffic in wireless networks, but so far the potential advantage of caching in improving physical layer security (PLS) is rarely considered. In this paper, we contribute to the design and theoretical understanding of exploiting the caching ability of users to improve the PLS in a wireless heterogeneous network (HetNet). In such network, the base station (BS) ensures the secrecy of communication by utilizing some of the available power to transmit a pre-cached file, such that only the eavesdropper's channel is degraded. Accordingly, the node locations of BSs, users and eavesdroppers are first modeled as mutually independent poisson point processes (PPPs) and the corresponding file access protocol is developed. We then derive analytical expressions of two metrics, average secrecy rate and secrecy coverage probability, for the proposed system. Numerical results are provided to show the significant security advantages of the proposed network and to characterize the impact of network resource on the secrecy metrics.Comment: submitted to IEEE ICC 201

Delay Analysis and Optimization in Cache-enabled Multi-Cell Cooperative Networks

Caching at the base stations (BSs) has been widely adopted to reduce the delivery delay and alleviate the backhaul traffic between BSs and the core network. In this paper, we consider a collaborative content caching scheme among BSs in cache-enabled multi-cell cooperative networks, where the requested contents can be obtained from the associated BS, the other collaborative BSs or the core network. Novelly, we model the stochastic request traffic and derive a closed form expression for the average delay per request based on multi-class processor sharing queuing theory. We then formulate a cooperative caching optimization problem of minimizing the average delay under the finite cache size constraint at BSs and show it to be at least NP-complete. Furthermore, we prove it equivalent to the maximization of a monotone submodular function subject to matroid constraints, allowing us to adopt the common greedy algorithm with 1/2 performance guarantee. A heuristic greedy caching strategy is also developed, achieving a better performance than the conventional greedy solution. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analytical results and demonstrate the performance gains obtained by our proposed caching scheme.Comment: submitted to IEEE GLOBECOM 201

Treating Content Delivery in Multi-Antenna Coded Caching as General Message Sets Transmission: A DoF Region Perspective

Coded caching can create coded multicasting thus significantly accelerates content delivery in broadcast channels with receiver caches. While the original delivery scheme in coded caching multicasts each coded message sequentially, it is not optimal for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channels. This work aims to investigate the full spatial multiplexing gain in multi-antenna coded caching by transmitting all coded messages concurrently. In specific, we propose to treat the content delivery as the transmission problem with general message sets where all possible messages are present, each with different length and intended for different user set. We first obtain inner and outer bounds of the degrees of freedom (DoF) region of a $K$-user $(M,N)$ broadcast channel with general message sets, with $M$ and $N$ being the number of transmit and receive antennas, respectively. Then for any given set of coded messages, we find its minimum normalized delivery time (NDT) by searching the optimal DoF tuple in the DoF regions. The obtained minimum NDT is optimal at antenna configuration $\frac{M}{N} \in (0,1]\cup[K, \infty)$ and is within a multiplicative gap of $\frac{M}{N}$ to optimum at $\frac{M}{N} \in (1,K)$. Our NDT results can be evaluated for any user demand with both centralized and decentralized cache placement.Comment: Part of this work was presented at IEEE GLOBECOM 201

Bandwidth Gain from Mobile Edge Computing and Caching in Wireless Multicast Systems

In this paper, we present a novel mobile edge computing (MEC) model where the MEC server has the input and output data of all computation tasks and communicates with multiple caching-and-computing-enabled mobile devices via a shared wireless link. Each task request can be served from local output caching, local computing with input caching, local computing or MEC computing, each of which incurs a unique bandwidth requirement of the multicast link. Aiming to minimize the transmission bandwidth, we design and optimize the local caching and computing policy at mobile devices subject to latency, caching, energy and multicast transmission constraints. The joint policy optimization problem is shown to be NP-hard. When the output data size is smaller than the input data size, we reformulate the problem as minimization of a monotone submodular function over matroid constraints and obtain the optimal solution via a strongly polynomial algorithm of Schrijver. On the other hand, when the output data size is larger than the input data size, by leveraging sample approximation and concave convex procedure together with the alternating direction method of multipliers, we propose a low-complexity high-performance algorithm and prove it converges to a stationary point. Furthermore, we theoretically reveal how much bandwidth gain can be achieved from computing and caching resources at mobile devices or the multicast transmission for symmetric case. Our results indicate that exploiting the computing and caching resources at mobile devices as well as multicast transmission can provide significant bandwidth savings.Comment: submitted to IEEE Trans. Wireless Communications. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1807.0553

Design and Optimization of VoD schemes with Client Caching in Wireless Multicast Networks

Due to the explosive growth in multimedia traffic, the scalability of video-on-demand (VoD) services becomes increasingly important. By exploiting the potential cache ability at the client side, the performance of VoD multicast delivery can be improved through video segment pre-caching. In this paper, we address the performance limits of client caching enabled VoD schemes in wireless multicast networks with asynchronous requests. Both reactive and proactive systems are investigated. Specifically, for the reactive system where videos are transmitted on demand, we propose a joint cache allocation and multicast delivery scheme to minimize the average bandwidth consumption under the zero-delay constraint. For the proactive system where videos are periodically broadcasted, a joint design of the cache-bandwidth allocation algorithm and the delivery mechanism is developed to minimize the average waiting time under the total bandwidth constraint. In addition to the full access pattern where clients view videos in their entirety, we further consider the access patterns with random endpoints, fixed-size intervals and downloading demand, respectively. The impacts of different access patterns on the resource-allocation algorithm and the delivery mechanism are elaborated. Simulation results validate the accuracy of the analytical results and also provide useful insights in designing VoD networks with client caching.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Delay Outage Probability of Multi-relay Selection for Mobile Relay Edge Computing Systems

In this paper, we deal with the problem of relay selection in mobile edge computing networks, where a source node transmits a computation-intensive task to a destination via the aid of multiple relay nodes. It differs from the traditional relay nodes in the way that each relay node is equipped with an edge computing server, thus each relay node can execute the received task and forwards the computed result to the destination. Accordingly, we define a delay outage probability to evaluate the impact of the relay computing ability on the link communications, and then propose a latency-best relay selection (LBRS) scheme that not only consider the communication capability, but also consider the computing ability. The performance of the proposed relay selection scheme with the traditional communication-only relay selection (CORS) and computing-only selection (CPORS) schemes in terms of the delay outage probability and the diversity order is analyzed, compared with other relay selection schemes. We show that the proposed LBRS scheme reduces to the traditional CORS scheme under the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. We further reveal that the diversity orders of both the proposed LBRS and CORS schemes are dependent on the computing ability of relay nodes.Comment: submitted to IEEE SPAWC 201

Communications-Caching-Computing Tradeoff Analysis for Bidirectional Data Computation in Mobile Edge Networks

With the advent of the modern mobile traffic, e.g., online gaming, augmented reality delivery and etc., a novel bidirectional computation task model where the input data of each task consists of two parts, one generated at the mobile device in real-time and the other originated from the Internet proactively, is emerging as an important use case of 5G. In this paper, for ease of analytical analysis, we consider the homogeneous bidirectional computation task model in a mobile edge network which consists of one mobile edge computing (MEC) server and one mobile device, both enabled with computing and caching capabilities. Each task can be served via three mechanisms, i.e., local computing with local caching, local computing without local caching and computing at the MEC server. To minimize the average bandwidth, we formulate the joint caching and computing optimization problem under the latency, cache size and average power constraints. We derive the closed-form expressions for the optimal policy and the minimum bandwidth. The tradeoff among communications, computing and caching is illustrated both analytically and numerically, which provides insightful guideline for the network designers.Comment: the short version of this paper is submitted to IEEE ISIT 202

Modeling and Trade-off for Mobile Communication, Computing and Caching Networks

Computation task service delivery in a computing-enabled and caching-aided multi-user mobile edge computing (MEC) system is studied in this paper, where a MEC server can deliver the input or output datas of tasks to mobile devices over a wireless multicast channel. The computing-enabled and caching-aided mobile devices are able to store the input or output datas of some tasks, and also compute some tasks locally, reducing the wireless bandwidth consumption. The corresponding framework of this system is established, and under the latency constraint, we jointly optimize the caching and computing policy at mobile devices to minimize the required transmission bandwidth. The joint policy optimization problem is shown to be NP-hard, and based on equivalent transformation and exact penalization of the problem, a stationary point is obtained via concave convex procedure (CCCP). Moreover, in a symmetric scenario, gains offered by this approach are derived to analytically understand the influences of caching and computing resources at mobile devices, multicast transmission, the number of mobile devices, as well as the number of tasks on the transmission bandwidth. Our results indicate that exploiting the computing and caching resources at mobile devices can provide significant bandwidth savings.Comment: to appear in IEEE GLOBECOM 201