Cooperative Caching and Transmission Design in Cluster-Centric Small Cell Networks

Wireless content caching in small cell networks (SCNs) has recently been considered as an efficient way to reduce the traffic and the energy consumption of the backhaul in emerging heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). In this paper, we consider a cluster-centric SCN with combined design of cooperative caching and transmission policy. Small base stations (SBSs) are grouped into disjoint clusters, in which in-cluster cache space is utilized as an entity. We propose a combined caching scheme where part of the available cache space is reserved for caching the most popular content in every SBS, while the remaining is used for cooperatively caching different partitions of the less popular content in different SBSs, as a means to increase local content diversity. Depending on the availability and placement of the requested content, coordinated multipoint (CoMP) technique with either joint transmission (JT) or parallel transmission (PT) is used to deliver content to the served user. Using Poisson point process (PPP) for the SBS location distribution and a hexagonal grid model for the clusters, we provide analytical results on the successful content delivery probability of both transmission schemes for a user located at the cluster center. Our analysis shows an inherent tradeoff between transmission diversity and content diversity in our combined caching-transmission design. We also study optimal cache space assignment for two objective functions: maximization of the cache service performance and the energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves performance gain by leveraging cache-level and signal-level cooperation and adapting to the network environment and user QoS requirements.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, submitted for possible journal publicatio

Content-centric wireless networks with limited buffers: when mobility hurts

We analyze throughput–delay scaling laws of mobile ad hoc networks under a content-centric traffic scenario, where users are mainly interested in retrieving contents cached by other nodes. We assume limited buffer size available at each node and Zipf-like content popularity. We consider nodes uniformly visiting the network area according to a random-walk mobility model, whose flight size varies from the typical distance among the nodes (quasi-static case) up to the edge length of the network area (reshuffling mobility model). Our main findings are: 1) the best throughput–delay tradeoffs are achieved in the quasi-static case: increasing the mobility degree of nodes leads to worse and worse performance; ii) the best throughput–delay tradeoffs can be recovered by power control (i.e., by adapting the transmission range to the content) even in the complete reshuffling case