Green and Mobility-Aware Caching in 5G Networks

With the drastic increase of mobile devices, there are more and more mobile traffic and repeated requests for content. In 5G networks, small cell base stations (SBSs) caching and caching in wireless device-to-device network can effectively decrease the mobile traffic during peak hours. Currently, most of the related work is focused on how to cache content on SBSs and on mobile devices, and it is assumed that the user can download the entire requested content through the connected SBSs and mobile devices. However, few works have taken user mobility and the randomness of contact duration into consideration. How to improve the caching strategy by exploiting user mobility is still a challenging problem. Thus, in this paper, we first investigate the problem of how to conduct caching placement on SBS and on mobile devices leveraging user mobility, aiming to maximize the cache hit ratio. Specifically, the caching placement on SBSs and on mobile devices is formulated as an integer programming problem, and submodular optimization is adopted to solve the formulated problem. Then, we give the optimal transmission power of SBSs and mobile devices to deliver the caching content in order to reduce the energy cost. Simulation results prove that our caching strategy is more efficient than other existing caching strategies in terms of both cache hit ratio and energy efficiency.