A Delay-Aware Caching Algorithm for Wireless D2D Caching Networks

Recently, wireless caching techniques have been studied to satisfy lower delay requirements and offload traffic from peak periods. By storing parts of the popular files at the mobile users, users can locate some of their requested files in their own caches or the caches at their neighbors. In the latter case, when a user receives files from its neighbors, device-to-device (D2D) communication is enabled. D2D communication underlaid with cellular networks is also a new paradigm for the upcoming 5G wireless systems. By allowing a pair of adjacent D2D users to communicate directly, D2D communication can achieve higher throughput, better energy efficiency and lower traffic delay. In this work, we propose a very efficient caching algorithm for D2D-enabled cellular networks to minimize the average transmission delay. Instead of searching over all possible solutions, our algorithm finds out the best pairs, which provide the best delay improvement in each loop to form a caching policy with very low transmission delay and high throughput. This algorithm is also extended to address a more general scenario, in which the distributions of fading coefficients and values of system parameters potentially change over time. Via numerical results, the superiority of the proposed algorithm is verified by comparing it with a naive algorithm, in which all users simply cache their favorite files

A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Framework for Content Caching

Content caching at the edge nodes is a promising technique to reduce the data traffic in next-generation wireless networks. Inspired by the success of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in solving complicated control problems, this work presents a DRL-based framework with Wolpertinger architecture for content caching at the base station. The proposed framework is aimed at maximizing the long-term cache hit rate, and it requires no knowledge of the content popularity distribution. To evaluate the proposed framework, we compare the performance with other caching algorithms, including Least Recently Used (LRU), Least Frequently Used (LFU), and First-In First-Out (FIFO) caching strategies. Meanwhile, since the Wolpertinger architecture can effectively limit the action space size, we also compare the performance with Deep Q-Network to identify the impact of dropping a portion of the actions. Our results show that the proposed framework can achieve improved short-term cache hit rate and improved and stable long-term cache hit rate in comparison with LRU, LFU, and FIFO schemes. Additionally, the performance is shown to be competitive in comparison to Deep Q-learning, while the proposed framework can provide significant savings in runtime.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure