Demand-aware cooperative content caching in 5G/6G networks with MEC-enabled edges

Abstract

Today, billions of smart devices are interconnected via wireless networks, leading to large volumes of video contents circulating through the bandwidth-limited backhaul. This causes network performance to deteriorate. As a mitigation mechanism, caching of highly popular contents to network edges is deployed. We propose a cooperative and demand-aware caching strategy, which is modelled using the Separable Assignment Problem, to maximize the cache hit ratio. This problem is solved with a recursive enumeration method, where dynamic programming is used to fill each edge. The extensive application-level evaluations show that the proposed strategy outperforms existing caching policies.