A Secure Approach for Caching Contents in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Caching aims to store data locally in some nodes within the network to be able to retrieve the contents in shorter time periods. However, caching in the network did not always consider secure storage (due to the compromise between time performance and security). In this paper, a novel decentralized secure coded caching approach is proposed. In this solution, nodes only transmit coded files to avoid eavesdropper wiretapping and protect the user contents. In this technique random vectors are used to combine the contents using XOR operation. We modeled the proposed coded caching scheme by a Shannon cipher system to show that coded caching achieves asymptotic perfect secrecy. The proposed coded caching scheme significantly simplifies the routing protocol in cached networks while it reduces over-caching and achieves a higher throughput capacity compared to uncoded caching in reactive routing. It is shown that with the proposed coded caching scheme any content can be retrieved by selecting a random path while achieving asymptotic optimum solution. We have also studied the cache hit probability and shown that the coded cache hit probability is significantly higher than uncoded caching. A secure caching update algorithm is also presented.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Energy Efficiency of Downlink Networks with Caching at Base Stations

Caching popular contents at base stations (BSs) can reduce the backhaul cost and improve the network throughput. Yet whether locally caching at the BSs can improve the energy efficiency (EE), a major goal for 5th generation cellular networks, remains unclear. Due to the entangled impact of various factors on EE such as interference level, backhaul capacity, BS density, power consumption parameters, BS sleeping, content popularity and cache capacity, another important question is what are the key factors that contribute more to the EE gain from caching. In this paper, we attempt to explore the potential of EE of the cache-enabled wireless access networks and identify the key factors. By deriving closed-form expression of the approximated EE, we provide the condition when the EE can benefit from caching, find the optimal cache capacity that maximizes the network EE, and analyze the maximal EE gain brought by caching. We show that caching at the BSs can improve the network EE when power efficient cache hardware is used. When local caching has EE gain over not caching, caching more contents at the BSs may not provide higher EE. Numerical and simulation results show that the caching EE gain is large when the backhaul capacity is stringent, interference level is low, content popularity is skewed, and when caching at pico BSs instead of macro BSs.Comment: Accepted by Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Special Issue on Energy-Efficient Techniques for 5G Wireless Communication System

Coded Caching based on Combinatorial Designs

We consider the standard broadcast setup with a single server broadcasting information to a number of clients, each of which contains local storage (called \textit{cache}) of some size, which can store some parts of the available files at the server. The centralized coded caching framework, consists of a caching phase and a delivery phase, both of which are carefully designed in order to use the cache and the channel together optimally. In prior literature, various combinatorial structures have been used to construct coded caching schemes. In this work, we propose a binary matrix model to construct the coded caching scheme. The ones in such a \textit{caching matrix} indicate uncached subfiles at the users. Identity submatrices of the caching matrix represent transmissions in the delivery phase. Using this model, we then propose several novel constructions for coded caching based on the various types of combinatorial designs. While most of the schemes constructed in this work (based on existing designs) have a high cache requirement (uncached fraction being $\Theta(\frac{1}{\sqrt{K}})$ or $\Theta(\frac{1}{K})$, $K$ being the number of users), they provide a rate that is either constant or decreasing ($O(\frac{1}{K})$) with increasing $K$, and moreover require competitively small levels of subpacketization (being $O(K^i), 1\leq i\leq 3$), which is an extremely important parameter in practical applications of coded caching. We mark this work as another attempt to exploit the well-developed theory of combinatorial designs for the problem of constructing caching schemes, utilizing the binary caching model we develop.Comment: 10 pages, Appeared in Proceedings of IEEE ISIT 201

General Caching Is Hard: Even with Small Pages

Caching (also known as paging) is a classical problem concerning page replacement policies in two-level memory systems. General caching is the variant with pages of different sizes and fault costs. We give the first NP-hardness result for general caching with small pages: General caching is (strongly) NP-hard even when page sizes are limited to {1, 2, 3}. It holds already in the fault model (each page has unit fault cost) as well as in the bit model (each page has the same fault cost as size). We also give a very short proof of the strong NP-hardness of general caching with page sizes restricted to {1, 2, 3} and arbitrary costs.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, an extended abstract appeared in the proceedings of MAPSP 2015 (www.mapsp2015.com), a conference version has been submitte

Content Delivery Latency of Caching Strategies for Information-Centric IoT

In-network caching is a central aspect of Information-Centric Networking (ICN). It enables the rapid distribution of content across the network, alleviating strain on content producers and reducing content delivery latencies. ICN has emerged as a promising candidate for use in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, IoT devices operate under severe constraints, most notably limited memory. This means that nodes cannot indiscriminately cache all content; instead, there is a need for a caching strategy that decides what content to cache. Furthermore, many applications in the IoT space are timesensitive; therefore, finding a caching strategy that minimises the latency between content request and delivery is desirable. In this paper, we evaluate a number of ICN caching strategies in regards to latency and hop count reduction using IoT devices in a physical testbed. We find that the topology of the network, and thus the routing algorithm used to generate forwarding information, has a significant impact on the performance of a given caching strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that focuses on latency effects in ICN-IoT caching while using real IoT hardware, and the first to explicitly discuss the link between routing algorithm, network topology, and caching effects.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, journal pape

Caching at the Edge with LT codes

We study the performance of caching schemes based on LT under peeling (iterative) decoding algorithm. We assume that users ask for downloading content to multiple cache-aided transmitters. Transmitters are connected through a backhaul link to a master node while no direct link exists between users and the master node. Each content is fragmented and coded with LT code. Cache placement at each transmitter is optimized such that transmissions over the backhaul link is minimized. We derive a closed form expression for the calculation of the backhaul transmission rate. We compare the performance of a caching scheme based on LT with respect to a caching scheme based on maximum distance separable codes. Finally, we show that caching with \acl{LT} codes behave as good as caching with maximum distance separable codes